Samsung Galaxy Note 7: Second 'safe' replacement catches fire
bbc.com
bbc.com
> 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.
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.
now about the particular case I think if apple was to sabotage something they'd have hit the Galaxy S7 line which is much more popular rather than the Note line.
anyway the yahoo hack theory might have more merit than the note 7 theory.
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.