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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.
I KNEW this was totally overblown. I have had my Note for weeks and am using it now. It hasn't had ANY issu
When I called Apple about a worn power cable, they said it's wear&tear. When I called back weeks later because it had evidently overheated and the plastic burnt off, they said it was customer abuse and refused to replace it. When I said that I'd seen reports on the web of this very same thing, they said they had no other reports of this sort.
I'm inclined to believe that the Apple procedure with safety matters is to pretend that nothing's wrong - I presume until some PR algorithm determines that it'd be against their interest to continue being dishonest.
I'm surprised it didn't happen with Tesla's autopilot (4 reported claims, 1 of which looks probably-true but has been questioned, the other three of which have zero substantiation and are of the form "my car crashed itself! It must have been that autopilot-thingy I heard about last week!"). Happened a lot with Toyota's acceleration thing.
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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?
...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.
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.