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Verizon Says It Will Not Push Samsung's Update That Disables Galaxy Note7 Because Of User Inconvenience (verizon.com)
Samsung confirmed on Friday that it will indeed release an update to Galaxy Note7 smartphones in the United States to "prevent US Galaxy Note7 devices from charging and will eliminate their ability to work as mobile devices." In a new wrinkle to this whole situation, Verizon said today it will not be releasing Samsung's software update to Galaxy Note7 users on Verizon network. In a blog post, Verizon said: "Verizon will not be taking part in this update because of the added risk this could pose to Galaxy Note 7 users that do not have another device to switch to. We will not push a software upgrade that will eliminate the ability for the Note 7 to work as a mobile device in the heart of the holiday travel season. We do not want to make it impossible to contact family, first responders or medical professionals in an emergency situation." To recall, the Galaxy Note7 remains banned on airlines by the FAA and has also been prohibited from being used on many other public transit services in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, similar bans have been imposed on the phone.
I still want to make the choice...
While I can't stand Verizon and consider the Note 7 an unmitigated disaster, you clearly have no understanding of how incredibly important 911 access is. Do the math for yourself and it's pretty clear that bricking the device makes absolutely no sense, given that a Note 7 user is 1000x more likely to place a 911 call than they are to have their phone combust. In fact, let's quickly walk through the math together...
The incident rate with the Note 7 was around 87 per million after the first three months or so. Even if we extrapolate the rate out to a full year, we're still talking about any particular Note 7 having less than a 0.04% chance of an incident in a given year. To the best of my recollection, none of the incidents to date have resulted in life-threatening injuries, so while 0.04% is an atrocious annual rate for a consumer product and well-deserving of a recall, a 0.04% annual incident rate isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things.
Contrast that with the fact that the US has a population of 320 million people who make 240 million 911 calls each year. 70% of the calls come from mobile devices and at least 80% are for actual, life-threatening emergencies. Based on that, we can say that lives are on the line for about 134 million 911 calls made from mobile phones in the US each year, which averages to about 2 calls per 5 Americans each year (42% annually). I'll admit that those calls are almost certainly not evenly distributed among the population, but we just want some ballpark estimates (i.e. orders of magnitude), so we'll use them as they are.
Suppose there are still one million Note 7 devices in use in the US. In the next half month, the odds suggest that about 15 of them will combust while 17,500 of them will be used to make 911 calls in response to life-threatening emergencies. As I said at the top, that means that a Note 7 user is over 1000x more likely to need to place a 911 call to save a life than they are to have their phone combust (which would probably cause more annoyance than injury).
But please, continue telling us about how Verizon is acting contrary to the safety and wellbeing of their customers.