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.