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FOIA Documents Detail iPods Overheating, Catching Fire
suraj.sun passes along a report from a Seattle TV station that has been investigating reports of Apple iPods overheating and bursting into flames. "An exclusive KIRO 7 Investigation reveals an alarming number of Apple brand iPod MP3 players have suddenly burst into flames and smoke, injuring people and damaging property. It's an investigation that Apple has apparently been trying to keep out of the public eye. It took more than 7 months for KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy to get her hands on documents concerning Apple's iPods from the Consumer Product Safety Commission because Apple's lawyers filed exemption after exemption. In the end, the CPSC released more than 800 pages which reveal, for the very first time, a comprehensive look that shows, on a number of occasions, iPods have suddenly burst into flames, started to smoke, and even burned their owners. ... Apple refused to comment, and refused to answer all of the other questions [the reporter] has been asking of the company since November."
Apple will block it, their zealots will ignore it, the masses won't here about it.
Apple will still be adored by the public, the iPod is too ubiquitous with mp3 player at this point to be shunned. Its like Windows, it may be bad and seem to be hated by a lot of people but it will still be the most dominant in the market.
I would appreciate it if we didn't tag every apple story with macbook if it doesn't have to do with macbooks. One day, I or someone else may actually want to use the tagging system for its function of looking up stuff that has to do with that tag, and I will not be happy when I want to look at macbook related stories and see 90% of the articles are about ipods.
So 1 in roughly every 11 million iPods has this sort of problem.
Out of curiosity, are there other products that burst into flames spontaneously at rates lower than 1 in every 11 million? I'm just thinking that if I bought 11 million of anything - including fire extinguishers - I wouldn't be terribly surprised if one went *FOOM!* one day.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
High enough energy density and you go from energy store to high explosive.
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The iPod was a great idea, and they deserve the kudos for it. However, I can tell you as a father I would not give one of these to my kids, or own one myself even if the probability of this happening is 1/1000000.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
. . . whilst fanboys scratch their heads trying to find an upside to burnt nostrils . . .
...I still get sick and tired of all of these absurd "special reports" on the news about the "unseen dangers" in the world that are orders of magnitude less likely to cause you serious harm than being struck by lightning. Certainly, Apple should be held responsible, particularly for their gross mishandling of the situation (trying to sweep it under the rug), but can we grow up a little? It does not seem that there has been any serious damage or injury as a result of this. This culture of fear that the news has been cultivating is beyond nauseating and is destroying our society piece by piece. Because of all the news coverage into child abductions, for instance, we teach our children that strangers are dangerous and keep them close to our chests at all times, despite the fact that the odds of a child being abducted by a stranger are literally 1 in a million! The same thing has happened with the War on Terror (TM), one terrorist attack and all of a sudden its necessary to start stripping away human rights and make air travel more or less unusable. We feel that airport security is necessary, despite the fact that it logically makes no sense. We see all the exposes on the dangers of drug use, yet fail to recognize that in reality aspirin is more dangerous. We humans are terrible at assessing risk, which leads to crap like this happening. I could fill an encyclopedia with examples of this, but I think the point I am trying to make is fairly clear, that this is juvenile behavior.
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"more than 800 pages of information, including 15 burn and fire-related incidents blamed by iPod owners"
Lets see, according to wikipedia, over 173 million ipods have been sold as of last September. Out of these, there are only 15 documented fire related incidents? Not to downplay the impact this had on the individuals but I can hardly see where this constitutes a risk to the public. At that rate, there are probably more ipod related choking incidents. The article keeps referring to the "800 pages" rather than the actual number of incidents which looks like they're trying to create the appearance that this is a big problem. If anyone feels that this is a serious danger then they need to be wearing a motorcycle hemet when walking around the house and and a life preserver at breakfast in case they might drown in their cereal bowl. Living involves some risks but I think this one I'll safely ignore.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Apple has quashed reporting of 100% of them.
Just curious... what catastrophic failure rate is the margin between a cover-up being ethical and a cover-up being unethical?
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I think it is plain and obvious to see that the reason Apple doesn't want removable batteries is to prevent a 3rd part market in battery sales but also to make products without removable batteries more "disposable." People can argue to the contrary, but the conclusion needs to fit with typical consumer behavior. Such behavior includes a high failure and low willingness to follow through with warranty claims and procedures among others such as the tendency to throw away instead of recycling. (It is useless to point out that some people WILL do those things. The majority of people will not.)
Simple question: How does this relate to the discussion at hand about iPods?
I suppose "Simple" is one way to describe your question.
The discussion at hand about iPods is not really about them catching fire. It's really about the fact that Apple has been trying to hide the fact from the public. Apple also tried to hide B&W G3 data corruption from the public by removing the TIL when they folded it into the KB. In general, Apple attempts to hide its failures from the public, to the detriment of the customer. Their cachet depends on people believing that they are somehow different from other manufacturers, but in reality they are depressingly similar.
It should not take a FOIA request to find out what the catch-fire-and-burn rate is on a piece of electronics you're considering purchasing. And it should not require that you surf the antique web to find out why your computer is corrupting files. Increasing used value increases new value, so preventing people from finding out about problems with your hardware potentially increases profits. It's certainly one thing working for Apple...
Comments like yours make me feel like I'm in school. Nobody should have had to write a fucking essay to explain this to you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Buying accessories to prevent bodily harm from a freaking cellphone or mp3 player seems pretty excessive to me. I'd sooner reconsider my purchase of such a device than go to these lengths...
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No, drinkypoo, it's not that Apple hid the story, but rather that Apple chose not to talk about it because it wasn't a story. I can't name one company in the world that wants to acknowledge a problem; not Apple, not Ford and not anyone else. They usually don't discuss such matters unless and until they become a publicly visible problem, and 15 units out of 175 MILLION units do not make a publicly visible problem unless somebody goes out of their way to make it one, which seems to be a big purview of anti-Apple zealots.
It may be a small percentage, but would you really want your child to be the lucky winner?
I hope you never leave your driveway. :(
Currently the newest story is "Visualizing False Positives In Broad Screening", regarding how to convey the rarity of events to people not familiar with statistics. While companies shouldn't be fighting to hard to keep these sorts of thing secret, I think we're probably forcing them to as a society since the public is largely unable to put these kinds of rare events in perspective. The 24-hour news channels will jump all over this sort of thing and blow it out of proportion to fill airtime, and the public ends up with the mindset that they're playing Russian roulette every time they use an ipod.
Ultimately, companies are probably going to keep suppressing this sort of info until everyone learns to look at this sort of information like adults.
I doubt most incidents are reported.
So 1 in roughly every 11 million iPods has this sort of problem.
No -- 1 in roughly every 11 million iPods has reported this sort of problem.
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Buying accessories to prevent bodily harm from a freaking cellphone or mp3 player seems pretty excessive to me. I'd sooner reconsider my purchase of such a device than go to these lengths...
So what you are saying then is that you'd rather go without a cell phone at all - since pretty much any modern cell phone uses the same battery tech.
Really? You'd really be without any cell phone ever, even for emergencies? That seems even less rational.
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Keeping in mind that Apple doesn't make the batteries, they have to have some degree of trust in their suppliers. I doubt anyone can picture Apple stupid enough to bait PR nightmares and lawsuits when their image is very important to their business model. Apple's typical reaction is the industry best-case product-problem-coverup-job - do everything reasonable to stick a lollypop in the mouth of anyone that screams, and quietly correct the problem so it doesn't happen again. They're unlikely to admit fault, that would just fan the flames. (pun?)
Batteries lately though do seem to be a serious problem all around for everyone. DSLAM phone boxes blowing up down the street, laptops and ipods catching fire, liio batteries puffing up like balloons. Inadequate testing if you ask me. New technology trying to get rushed into a highly competitive new market, skip the tests it's good enough, just ship it. Then stuff blows up catches fire, or generally misbehaves. But right now rechargeable batteries are making a shambles out of Moore's Law.
This isn't really news any more than the 5 o-clock rush hour. Blame Apple, blame Sony, whatever, it's going to happen. It's not anywhere outside the bell curve yet.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Do you think you're refuting the cover-up claims by linking to a document published by Apple?
If you do think that, you're wrong. The cover-up being reported on here is attempts by Apple lawyers to prevent public documents being obtained under freedom of information laws.
It shouldn't take seven months for someone to obtain access to documents funded by the public purse.