Slashdot Mirror
Apple Blames 'External Forces' For Exploding iPhones
Shome writes "Apple has stated that there is no evidence that recent iPhone explosions reported by users are connected to overheating of batteries.
It may be stated that French consumer affairs authorities have started their own investigation on the reported explosions, some of which have caused minor injuries to the users, and are studying the phone's safety features.
The Inquirer runs a piece that blames Apple for blaming its customers. 'This mysterious force is not God, or a rival religion, nor does it require any metaphysics to understand. An "external force" is just Apple's term for the black shirted people who believe that everything that Apple makes is wonderful. It is what other companies call their "customers," writes Nick Farrell.'"
Sometimes it is the customer's fault.
Boy is that true. I have an XBOX 360 I don't play very often. I dusted it off when Ghostbusters came out. Up until I got this game, I had the system sitting vertical. When I hooked it up for GB, I had it laying flat. While playing the game, the fan noise was really bad, worse than it was when I had played it months before. I wondered if rotating it vertically would reduce the fan noise. So, I picked it up, turned it, and *SCREECH*. I pulled the disc out and it had a nice circular scratch on it. Yes, I was that stupid.
My friends didn't understand why I bought another copy of the game instead of taking it back. They all had suggestions for the excuses I could use and all that. Given the cost of the game, I probably could have gotten mad at Microsoft, and people would have rallied behind me. "Well the system should have been designed better! I never scratched a disc moving my laptop or dvd player!!" I didn't feel right about that, though. It was my fault.
This post is semi-off-topic, so I figure I'll at least share a little bit of useful info. After I scratched this game, I thoguht it'd be worth trying to recover the disc. I bought a MadCatz DVD repair kit from GameStop. It worked. My scratched copy of Ghostbusters was restored (at least partially, I haven't attempted an installed) and it made one of my old DVDs playable again. It wasn't the fastest thing in the world to do, but it could have saved me $60.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yup. I watched one iPhone 3G nearly split completely in two when a coworker's kids were fighting over who got to play the next game on it. Shattered the screen, cracked the case, and luckilly the battery came out whole or it most likely would have ruptured being an older LiIon. Those kids spend 6 months of chores working that one off...
I've also had several coworkers drop their phones on concrete and driveways, and in many cases even without marring the outside of the phone, the screen shatters in much the way it appears in the images provided by apple. Cracks seeming to ceom from the center, though the device landed on edge. none of their batteries blew out.
I've also seen one coworker's device outgas in his car, marking up his dash, and he was lucky it didn't catch fire. Dumbass left it running in a parked car that was off, doors open and music blasting through the stereo, and apparently left the GPS enabled, parked it in the sun not far from a friend's backyard pool. 6-7 hours later, music stopped and smoke was billowing from his car. Do you think he blamed Apple? nope, he forked over $600 for a new phone though...
I dropped my 2G about 50 times... The metal casing was all shot to shit, but it never cracked the screen. Eventually it failed due to a GPU firmware issue that effected a particular line of serial numbers and Apple replaced it for free. I had 4 scratches in the screen, dings and dents all over it, and they never questioned it;s condition (other than looking for the immersion litmus through the haedphone jack). I even dropped it once in a downpour and STEPPED ON IT, screen down on the concrete (how it got 2 of the scrathes). Damned things are frigging indestructible...
My 3Gs and my wife's 3G (we got lucky on the trade-in, local apple store was out of 2Gs and instead of making us repeat a 4 hour round trip, they gave her a 3G as a replacement) and My 3GS have been dropped numerous times. 20 month old baby keeps snatching them from pockets ort tables and throwing them across the room. Not a scratch on either yet. Close firend, he's gone through 2 blackberries and a G1 in the last 10 months with a child doing exactly the same thing, though my living room is a hardwood floor and HIS IS CARPETED!
The iPhone is one of the most solid devices I've seen yet, the screen is DAMNED hard to scratch, the defice is rugged, and it takes either a sgnificant, or repetitive shock to cause it damage. other phones fall apart being simply dropped the wrong way. if only "single digit" reports (which btw, is not a single countries total, but Apple's worldwide collection of returned devices accused of exploding) out of 50-150 million devices equippped with those betteries, then who are you to blame it on manufacturing, when not a single reported case has been linked to anything but abuse?
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
From everything I've read, these 'explosions' (and I use that term generously) are the result of the iphone battery being shorted or in extreme cases, ruptured. I've never heard of a case of explosions because someone 'sat' on their iphone. Considering the millions of phones out there and the ease at which such 'sitting' test could be reproduced by ANY person with an iPhone I would have to take that with a grain of salt.
Current good theories are that the battery itself gets short circuited since the iPhone is not designed with a user replaceable battery, it doesn't contain the usual shielding around the battery like a normal cell phone does. As a result, an extreme enough break in the casing that impacts the battery can cause it to let the magic smoke out.
Go work doing warranty computer repair for a while... You'll become a cynic too. I've seen more than my fair share of laptops that just "suddenly stopped working" due to apparent spontaneous creation of red wine or cola within the case. The customers will go out of their way to clean the outside of the case, hoping that we won't notice the sticky residue that's coating the guts of the computer. There are many cases of cracked screens (both laptops and phones) that the customer legitimately did not see happen - but those are far more likely to be cases where the screen got cracked due to poor handling than due to manufacturing defects.
And Apple does occasionally own up to their (and their suppliers') mistakes, when there's a significant statistical outlier in terms of failures. Batteries, graphics chips, power supplies, power adapters... I even remember my parents' 15" Apple CRT being covered by an extended warranty in about 1995 because it had a tendency to start flickering yellow. But they don't do that every time somebody on the Internet makes a fuss - whether legitimate or not. Apple customers are ridiculously picky. Like those who complained about the mold lines on the G4 Cube's plastic. Or about misalignment of a laptop case by less than a millimeter. Or a hard drive that clicks slightly differently from what customers are used to hearing (which, admittedly can sometimes be a sign of failure, but can also just be the way it was designed).