Last fall, I was on a few flights, and each one of the safety announcements included a comment along the lines of: “Please be advised that due to the fire hazard, Samsung 7 phones cannot be used during the flight.”
I was on a flight more recently, and the announcement was much sterner: “Please be advised that Transport Canada Regulations do not allow Samsung 7 phones to be brought onto the aircraft. If you have brought one aboard, please contact the staff immediately to arrange to have it taken off the aircraft.”
So, it’s obviously the flammable batteries, with the risk assessment getting even worse.
How is Samsung handling this? Is it affecting their stock prices? Their market share?
Share price took a sharp but very brief hit and has continued a general upward trend since then.
Samsung’s top executive faces some legal jeopardy in connection with bribery allegations connected to the weird scandals around South Korea’s president. It’s hard to tell how serious those issues are.
I hope zombie Jobs isn’t gloating. A big part of the issue is that the Note 7 doesn’t have a removable battery, so the battery can not simply get replaced. This is a design “feature” that is borrowed from Apple, and Apple devices aren’t specifically immune to similar problems, they just don’t have the same battery source.
Of course I doubt flight attendants are trained to recognize phones, and this ban is more bark than bite.
I was thinking about it more as negative publicity - anyone has flown in the past half year has been getting these regular notifications that the Samsung is a fire liability. That can’t be good.
In that case, the answer is, yes, Samsung has received lots of bad publicity. Not only thousands of daily pre-boarding announcements, but it made national news, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert mocked it, etc.
As for sales and market share, Samsung doesn’t usually break out quarterly phone sales so there is no way to know for sure. If, at their next quarterly earnings report (which is in about a week), they crow about how some high percentage of Note 7 owners traded in for another Samsung device instead of taking a refund, then that might be an indication that the average person didn’t give it too much thought. Gartner and IDC both said Samsung smartphone shipments were down about 13-14% in 3Q16 compared to 3Q15, but who knows if those numbers are accurate.
Samsung has already concluded its investigation into the fires and will release those findings the day before the earnings report. They’ve leaked that the batteries were the main cause as opposed to a hardware or software design issue, so it sounds like they are confident enough to set up someone else as the fall guy. We’ll know more in a few days.
I hope this will prompt at least a few manufacturers to go back to offering phones with removable batteries. Apple and their design anorexia has infected the entire market - I’d rather have a phone that is 2mm thicker that I can change the battery when it wears out.
I don’t know if Jobs or his lackey Ives is more at fault. When did “can it fit into a teenage girl’s jeans back pocket without making a lump” become the sole design criteria? I really like the Nexus 5X I’m using, but wish it had a removable battery. I have the skill to open it up and replace it, but not everyone does.
Nice dig on Apple, but it’s misplaced here. The “non-replaceable” batteries in modern phones can be replaced by someone with the proper tools in ~10 minutes. And the proper tools cost like $10.
If it were possible to fix this problem by replacing faulty batteries, I’m pretty sure Samsung would do that, rather than scrapping a bunch of ~$600 phones. In fact, they did try to do that initially, recalling phones with a certain battery maker and using a different battery. But that didn’t solve the problem. Because the problem wasn’t a faulty battery.
The phone tolerances were too tight because of the thinness war that Apple started. It’s only through sheer luck that it wasn’t Apple that got bit. And don’t get me started on Apple and their pentalobe and tri-wing screws. I curse Jobs’ moldering corpse every time I have to open any product he had anything to do with.
Samsung isn’t just a phone manufacturer, they are one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world, and makes a wide variety of consumer electronics and appliances. Samsung is predicting a record $7.2 billion profit for the 4th quarter of 2016. Their stock is doing great.
Dig? I was holding back, there are other posts here that are less kind, so if I wanted to get critical you’d know…
Apply *does *intentionally make their devices hard to service. And it’s not just proprietary driver heads and small parts - some of their devices had glued in batteries (particularly the Retina line), though I think they’ve mostly stopped doing that.
The founder of iFixit (I think) ripped Apple a new one about the near impossibility of recycling the new MacBook Air, that their claims of being “green” were smoke and mirrors, obtained via donations.
It’s Apple’s fault that Samsung’s phones blow up. That is fucking hilarious.
But either way, if the investigation results Samsung has already leaked are true, you are wrong. Breached tolerances might have been what a lot of people assumed, but apparently it is not the case. The leak says the battery itself was the main cause for the explosions and that the fires were not the result of hardware design. I mean, you might be right- Samsung PR might be softening the ground for when they release the full report and they intend to walk back the “it wasn’t a hardware design problem” conclusion with “it wasn’t a hardware design problem, but…” On that day I look forward to how you will characterize that, too, as Apple’s fault.
Do you want to offer up any evidence at all that there is a quid pro quo deal between Apple and Greenpeace? Or whoever else these “donations” are going to? Or do you just put more stock in a guy promoting his website with easy Apple clickbait than Greenpeace?
I mean, good for you for holding back. Are you suggesting that your comment wasn’t critical of Apple? It obviously was. Are you suggesting that it was relevant? It wasn’t. The increased difficulty of changing the battery has nothing to do with why Samsung’s phones are catching on fire.
I learned about it on episode 534 of MacBreak Weekly, which aired November 22, 2016. Three huge Apple fans talking about the issue recycling the MacBook Air. I’ve worked on them, and know just how unrepairable they are.