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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like a good strategy for an unethical competitor. <100 devices and only a few uncorroborated reports but drastic images are enough to trigger this?

There are presumably plenty of ways to make a LiIon fail dramatically if you just know where to push or apply some directed heat. Ifixit has that covered I think.

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There were less then that many shark attacks last year. People are still terrified of sharks.

Not a perfect analogy but people are terrified of things that are incredibly unlikely. It's legitimately hard for a phone manufacturer. 0.00001% is too many explosions if you sell a couple million phones.

There have been roughly a hundred incidents so far. The phone was out for about a month. Assuming first year sales would have been quadruple first month sales and the same rate of burnouts over the year, that's 100 * 4 * 12 = 4,800 incidents in a year.

One of these incidents happened in a car on the road and another happened on a plane. One happened while a child was holding it and another while the owner was asleep causing smoke inhalation injuries. Taking those as 'aggravated circumstances' we could expect to see 4 * 4 * 12 = roughly 200 cases in aggravated circumstances.

Not even very expensive or difficult to do. A small group of people could coordinate such a thing pretty easily.

You can see a single opinion has taken over the internet where everyone is convinced any Note 7 in existence is a ticking time bomb that can kill you at any moment.

>You can see a single opinion has taken over the internet where everyone is convinced any Note 7 in existence is a ticking time bomb that can kill you at any moment.

Whereas the truth is?

that out of 2 million devices 97 burned or exploded?

So far.

yeah that's the thing, you extrapolate this over time and gets very bad fairly quickly..

Am I getting this right? We should be OK with 1 in 20,000 odds of a phone exploding in our hands or burning down the house?

Because that's what 97 in 2 million amounts to.

Besides, that's just in the first couple months of release. Can you guarantee that a device run with a known, faulty, battery issue, wont result in more explosion as it gets used for more time?

It's not like "if you switched it on for the first time and it didn't explode it never will".

If anything time (and wear on battery etc) could be a compounding factor...

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