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#437901 - 07/21/09 09:31 AM
Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 08/09/06
Posts: 9113
Loc: red dirt state of mind
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Quote:
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.
Owners like Jamie Balderas of Arlington, Washington, who contacted KIRO 7 in November of 2008.
“At first I thought, how in the heck did I get burned? Right there?” she told Clancy, while pointing to a penny-sized, round burn on her chest. “Then I remembered that I had my iPod right there.”
Balderas says her brand new iPod Shuffle overheated while she was running days before, leaving her with a small burn right where the iPod was clipped to her shirt, next to her skin. “My skin started burning really bad, like it was a bee sting that wouldn’t stop.”
MORE
My Creative Zen V went belly up this weekend, but I don't think I'll be replacing it with an iPod.
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#437902 - 07/21/09 02:35 PM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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AC Cream Wannabe
Registered: 03/14/06
Posts: 589
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Seems like there have been "15 burn and fire-related incidents blamed by iPod owners on their iPods". Out of millions of iPods sold since their introduction, that seems like an insignificant amount. Wikipedia (and some of Apple's own PR) indicates that 173,000,000 (one hundred and seventy three MILLION) iPods have been sold. If a journalist really believes that a reported 15 out of 173,000,000 is "an alarming number", then they need to go back to school. If anything, Apple has done consumers a favor by shipping enough lithium batteries to help demonstrate the true failure / explosion rate of these devices, so that it can be demonstrated how safe they are. Someone should send this journalist a copy of Innumeracy : Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences so that maybe they can get a clue.
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#437903 - 07/21/09 04:37 PM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 08/09/06
Posts: 9113
Loc: red dirt state of mind
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Electronics meant to be worn in clothing or on your person should never catch on fire, fail yes, burn no. And you don't have to jump to another website and read a lot of crap to understand that.
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#437904 - 07/21/09 05:50 PM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 09/23/04
Posts: 10321
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I'm about ready to toss mine in the lake. If you get a new computer why can't you plug the sonsofbitches in and synch it right up? Stupid device. I own the rights to all my music and I have to resort to a crack or hack to place them where I want to listen to them?
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#437905 - 07/21/09 06:00 PM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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AC Cream Wannabe
Registered: 03/14/06
Posts: 589
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Quote:
Electronics meant to be worn in clothing or on your person should never catch on fire, fail yes, burn no. And you don't have to jump to another website and read a lot of crap to understand that.
Blame the battery people -- Apple doesn't manufacture batteries, they just use them. All batteries possess the capability to explode. iPods (and similarly other mp3 players) are also especially prone to sweat leaking into them, causing shorts and malfunctions. We're not talking about Faberge eggs here -- these devices take abuse under a multitude of conditions (cold, heat, shock, fluids). It might just be that they are the most widespreadly propagated, densely constructed, electronic device yet unleashed on the mass populace, so we get to see more edge cases for failure.
To be honest, I would have expected a explosion / fire rate higher by two or three orders of magnitude. 15 out of 173,000,000 is insignificant -- that's lottery winning odds.
The link I provided is to a book, describing the lack of functional math knowledge possessed by the general populace, and how their inability to understand it affects their lives in negative ways. By considering a failure rate of 1 in 11 million a significant event, you have reinforced the author's premise.
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#437906 - 07/21/09 06:16 PM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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AC Cream Wannabe
Registered: 03/14/06
Posts: 589
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Quote:
I'm about ready to toss mine in the lake. If you get a new computer why can't you plug the sonsofbitches in and synch it right up? Stupid device. I own the rights to all my music and I have to resort to a crack or hack to place them where I want to listen to them?
I guess it has to do with rights management, and making sure people who buy licenses to music only use it as intended (according to the anal rightsholders). They also get to do some nicer tricks with the database they use to store the file data, rather than relying on files and folders as provided by the user alone.
There are lots of good (non-iTunes) programs that can get songs on and off iPods; most of em aren't even hacks or hard to use. Let me know if you need some recommendations.
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#437907 - 07/21/09 06:30 PM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 09/23/04
Posts: 10321
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Thanks ddg, but I know how to do what I want. I may be the exception but I only have music I burned off CD's I purchased from Amazon or an actual record store and songs from iTunes.
It just pisses me off when I can't have them on my home computer, ipod and work computer without going through some backdoor (not that it's that complicated).
It pisses me off like a windows mobile device that MS activesync used to not synchronize with more than one computer. Just Stupid. People have more than one computer and one device.
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#437909 - 07/22/09 02:07 AM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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AC Cream Wannabe
Registered: 03/14/06
Posts: 589
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Quote:
It just pisses me off when I can't have them on my home computer, ipod and work computer without going through some backdoor (not that it's that complicated).
It pisses me off like a windows mobile device that MS activesync used to not synchronize with more than one computer. Just Stupid. People have more than one computer and one device.
What you're describing are some of the nuances of maintaining sync between multiple devices and their contents. The sync software has to make tradeoffs, and has several constraints on how it can and needs to operate.
Consider the following possible scenarios that iTunes (and other sync software) needs to deal with :
- your music collection is in iTunes, and is larger than the size of your iPod
- your music collection is in iTunes, and your family owns multiple iPods that need to be synced with the same computer
- your music collection is in iTunes, and you want to sync with your home desktop, work laptop, and a friend's machine
iTunes actually has methods of coping with most of the above scenarios (#3 gets tricky). Now consider imposing additional limitations and tricks on the devices because of rights-holders demands...
It sounds like you have a grasp on some of the nuances of this crap from past products and attempts. In Apple's case, I think the rise of the Music / App Store (and the tracking and deployment of apps and songs purchased) and the recent iPods and iPhones being full-fledged computers (rather than just embedded systems with accessible storage) has led Apple to close off direct access to the filesystem for the average user.
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#437910 - 07/22/09 05:24 AM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 08/09/06
Posts: 9113
Loc: red dirt state of mind
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Quote:
Wow, that's a pretty huge margin of perfection you're expecting there. Especially considering people do things far more dangerous every day like drive cars and cross the street. Of course someone from the South would be a fucking idiot.
Yeah, I know we stupid southerners don't expect to be burned by those super dangerous mp3 players. We must be crazy. We just assume that something that is designed to go in the breast pocket won't blow up in our faces. So you keep your mp3 player wrapped in Kevlar? That's much smarter than us and not paranoid in the least.
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#437911 - 07/22/09 05:42 AM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 08/09/06
Posts: 9113
Loc: red dirt state of mind
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Quote:
I'm about ready to toss mine in the lake. If you get a new computer why can't you plug the sonsofbitches in and synch it right up? Stupid device. I own the rights to all my music and I have to resort to a crack or hack to place them where I want to listen to them?
Every time I think about buying anything from apple these days I see a poor young Chinese man bought sold for his liver. So remember don't buy from anything apple unless you want to aid the illegal organ trade.
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#437912 - 07/22/09 01:06 PM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 08/03/03
Posts: 5849
Loc: TX, USA
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Quote:
Wow, that's a pretty huge margin of perfection you're expecting there. Especially considering people do things far more dangerous every day like drive cars and cross the street. Of course someone from the South would be a fucking idiot.
I take it from this you've never been involved in engineering, particular not with devices with Lithium cells?
I worked in PeeCee design years ago and in the late 1980s through early 1990s we had problems with the Lithium primary cells for the clock exploding. Somehow nobody ever got killed, probably because the failure rate was so low, comparable to the "thermal runaway" incidents seen since 2000. But we still spent a lot money over many years on research and redesigning the batteries, chip & motherboards. Finally it was figured out and solved before we had to resort to small armored boxes for that battery...
It's standard practice in product design to worry about incidents this rare if there's a risk of injury or property damage beyond the item in question. Li-poly secondaries don't explode but the flame from a thermal runaway can't be put out, is hot enough to start other fires, and gives off high toxic fumes. Were a notebook battery to go into thermal runaway in your house the house might well burn down if the firefighters didn't hurry.
_________________________
"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock
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#437913 - 07/24/09 06:47 AM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Max Hardcore Prison Bitch
Registered: 12/24/06
Posts: 167
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#437914 - 07/25/09 07:49 PM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Fucking Master
Registered: 04/16/09
Posts: 3703
Loc: Sleeping through my funeral
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Quote:
Quote:
Wow, that's a pretty huge margin of perfection you're expecting there. Especially considering people do things far more dangerous every day like drive cars and cross the street. Of course someone from the South would be a fucking idiot.
I take it from this you've never been involved in engineering, particular not with devices with Lithium cells?
I worked in PeeCee design years ago and in the late 1980s through early 1990s we had problems with the Lithium primary cells for the clock exploding. Somehow nobody ever got killed, probably because the failure rate was so low, comparable to the "thermal runaway" incidents seen since 2000. But we still spent a lot money over many years on research and redesigning the batteries, chip & motherboards. Finally it was figured out and solved before we had to resort to small armored boxes for that battery...
It's standard practice in product design to worry about incidents this rare if there's a risk of injury or property damage beyond the item in question. Li-poly secondaries don't explode but the flame from a thermal runaway can't be put out, is hot enough to start other fires, and gives off high toxic fumes. Were a notebook battery to go into thermal runaway in your house the house might well burn down if the firefighters didn't hurry.
And if you were an engineer like you claim to be you'd know that 15 out of 173,000,000 are infinitesimal odds. nothing is designed that well that it will never fall fail.
_________________________
Leave your mind open, receptive to the demons message.
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#437915 - 07/27/09 07:40 PM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 08/09/06
Posts: 9113
Loc: red dirt state of mind
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Fail yes, explode no. So are you for or against Steve Jobs purchasing his liver on the black market? If only he had waited he could have got that Foxconn employees liver for free. Anything for the company.
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#437916 - 07/28/09 12:31 AM
Re: Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents
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Porn Jesus
Registered: 08/03/03
Posts: 5849
Loc: TX, USA
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h2c is right.
People generally didn't tell me about run-of-the-mill bugs and problems after I finished a project: the lab techs could take care of those later in development and there were several groups of engineers who fixed problems after I threw a project over the wall at manufacturing. I was rarely bothered about those things.
But I'm sure I heard about it every time there was an explosion, as well as every fire not in the power supply. Every single one was a big deal, even if the product was past end-of-life.
It's not so much the odds as the expectation. Ford engineers don't hear about every crash because they're cars and everyone knows they crash. But nobody expects a desktop computer to *explode* and bury metal shrapnel in the walls and ceiling, and even once is going to get attention.
_________________________
"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock
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