Slashdot Mirror
At Least 26 Claimed Galaxy Note 7 Fire Reports Were Untrue, Samsung Says (zdnet.com)
Lately, a lot of behind the scene conversations have been suggesting that perhaps the Note 7 battery explosion fiasco has been blown out of the proportion. There's no evidence of any of that, so we won't discuss it any further, but amid all of this, Samsung has confirmed that at least 26 explosion reports that circulated everywhere were hoaxes. From a ZDNet report:Out of the 26 reports, the South Korean tech giant said that in 12 cases they found no fault with the devices. In seven cases, the reported victim could not be reached and in another seven incidents, the consumer cancelled the report or alleged that they threw away the device. In the US, where 1 million devices were recalled, nine such cases were reported. There were three in South Korea, two in France, and one each from the UK, Canada, Singapore, Philippines, Turkey, Vietnam, Croatia, Romania, Iraq, Lebanon, the UAE, and Czech Republic. In Korea, a worker at a convenience store alleged online that their phone exploded but Samsung said the person was currently unreachable. The user in Canada used a picture they found of the Note 7 catching fire and posed it as their own, the company said, and in Singapore, a user claimed they threw the handset out of their car when it caught fire but could not show proof.Makes you think doesn't it?
Shockingly, we are unable to contact this person whose primary communications device has exploded.
And it also turned out that some of the explosions have to do with idiot users buying cheap as shit chargers with bad or no resistors.
Of all things to cheap out on, the power equipment.
But because all sites need their good boy points with Apple so they can get exclusive coverage and free products, it's been a witch hunt against Samsung.
The ironic difference between Samsung and Apple here?
Samsung recalls shit when it breaks even with small numbers.
Apple waits a year to just start considering a repair program for many trashcan pros with faulty and broken AMD chipsets in them, or tell you you are holding a phone wrong.
Tech journalism needs to die.
I KNEW this was totally overblown. I have had my Note for weeks and am using it now. It hasn't had ANY issu
Not much of a surprise, we see this sort of thing with any widely reported issue with a specific product. History is rife with examples of mass hysteria, combined with users/owners trying to blame their mistakes on the manufacturer.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
That 12 is not all the devices. They're saying 12 of the 26 were not faulty, and they go on to mention other sections of the 26 that had other issues.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
How many reports were there? Showing me that 26 are likely false doesn't mean much if there were over 100 to begin with whereas if there are 30 then it's likely that there's no problem with the phone. Numbers are only useful when taken in context.
12!=479001600
ftfy
It is unwise to ascribe motive
People are idiots. Some want attention. Some want ad revenue. Some just are bored or something. This kind of thing always happens. It surely happens to Samsung's competitors too. It definitely happened to Toyota during the Prius acceleration scare (and surely Audi too so long ago).
You shouldn't take all reports as gospel. This shouldn't make you think, you should always be thinking.
In the end what really matters is whether Note 7s were experiencing battery fires at a higher rate than normal. And the answer still appears to be yes, clearly yes. So Samsung did the right thing with the recall.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The bigger question is why you would throw away a $1000 device that was clearly faulty. Does everyone really have that kind of spare cash to say - meh, it's broken after a week, guess I'll just go buy something else.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
there is a burning object that happens to be with you in a car driving at considerable speed. What do you do?
...to see if it will stick. Kudos to their PR department, they're trying to minimize the problem. It's all bullshit though.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
What's supposed to be wrong with it? Other than the extra "the" at the end, it looks perfectly correct to me.
Well okay, I'd hyphenate "behind-the-scenes" as well, but I don't see anything deserving of mocking their language skills.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I got better...
It's easy to twist perception when you provide a statistic without the context necessary to understand it.
For instance, saying that 26 reports are hoaxes makes it sounds like the issue is being massively overblown in the media. But we know from other reporting that Samsung has received at least 92 reports in the US alone . And according to the summary, only 9 of those 26 "hoax" reports originated in the US, so if we just take the numbers at face value, it would suggest that at least 90% of the reports are NOT hoaxes.
To say the least, putting it in that context paints a very different picture.
And that's before you even start to look at what they've deemed to be a "hoax". If you do so, you'll realize pretty quickly that what they've actually done is identify 26 cases that may be hoaxes. A more accurate way labeling of their numbers would suggest that 12 of the 26 worldwide reports were verifiably not the phone's fault, but that the remaining 14 were unverifiable one way or the other. Beyond that and you're starting to ascribe intent, rather than sticking to the facts.
If we want to get a better sense of what's actually going on, it makes sense to exclusively limit ourselves to verifiable reports. If we start by assuming that 12 of 26 is a representative approximation for how many reports are verifiable out of the ones Samsung labeled as "hoaxes", then it would suggest that roughly 4 of the 9 "hoax" reports from the US are verifiable and 5 are unverifiable. That leaves us with 87 reports (i.e. 92 - 5) that should be verifiable one way or the other, of which 83 (i.e. 87 - 4) would be verifiably accurate. Given that 1M units were sold in the US, we can say that the verifiable failure rate to date is 83 out of every 1M, with that number likely rising over time as more verifiable reports come in.
Unfortunately for Samsung, that number is WELL beyond the 24 out of every 1M estimation that they publicly stated a few weeks back, so it should come as no surprise that they'd be trying to put a positive spin on things.
And, of course, an easy way to put a positive spin on things is to throw out some big numbers in a vacuum and hope people don't ask too many questions. Which is what they seem to be doing here.