
Samsung Galaxy Note 7: Second 'safe' replacement catches fire - M_Grey
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37600014
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molecule
Interesting that both incidents took place in Kentucky:

 _> A man in Kentucky said he was "scared to death" when he woke to a bedroom
full of smoke, local media say._

 _> On Wednesday a replacement Note 7 caught fire on a Southwest Airlines
plane due to fly from Louisville, Kentucky, to Baltimore, Maryland._

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behnamoh
I don't think these are just "coincidences". I used to believe that business,
esp. the kind of business Apple and other tech giants are doing, is ethical,
clean, and beautiful. I can't emphasize now how much different I believe this
is.

A little conspiracy here, but what if Apple had indeed sabotaged the Note 7
production line? We know they had no new features to add to iPhone 7 and they
already knew the new iPhone is not going to be a big hit. So what they did
instead is they ruined the face of their biggest competitor (Samsung), so that
desperate Note 7 buyers will turn to iPhone 7+ as their only option.

The same conspiracy can be said for the latest Yahoo hack. Isn't it weird and
suspicious that _just_ when Verizon is going to buy Yahoo, this huge hack
happens? Add that to the news that Verizon now wants a sweat $1B discount on
their deal with Yahoo... It's all fishy man.

~~~
glenra
> _what if Apple had indeed sabotaged the Note 7 production line?_

Here's a better hypothesis: building a smartphone that is very thin yet has
decent battery life and charges quickly is _really hard_. It requires tricky
engineering that is possible to screw up and Samsung did in fact screw it up.
Although the first explanation that came to mind was "the batteries were bad"
that was not the correct explanation. The correct explanation is that the
_design_ was bad. Maybe this case is too small and inflexible to allow for
heat expansion, maybe some contacts are too close together, maybe some
material that wasn't supposed to be conductive is (sometimes) conducting a
charge.

Making an iPhone-competitive phone is hard. Making a _million_ of them to ship
all at once means even a one-in-ten-thousand risk of catastrophic failure is
way too high, so at the same time as you're pushing the limits of what
engineering is capable of you have to build in a very large safety margin or
have an extremely good QA process or both.

When you think about it, the amazing thing isn't that the Note 7 design
failed, the amazing thing is that this doesn't happen more often, either to
Samsung or to other manufactures.

