Samsung Electronics Announces Cause of Galaxy Note7 Incidents in Press Conference – Samsung (Jan 23, 2017)
See the Techmeme link below for full coverage of the press conference by reporters; the full press conference can be viewed here, with the conference starting around 29:30; and there’s some more detail on testing and other elements here. The related narrative has also been updated today to reflect the latest news.
My to-do list for Samsung at this press conference was as follows: demonstrate that the company really had found the root causes of both sets of battery fires, in a way that was credible; where possible have third parties involved; and talk through the changes to manufacturing processes to avoid these issues in future. It checked off each of these items at its press conference, so in that sense it did exactly what it needed to do: so far, so good. On the other hand, the results indicate that the manufacturing processes at Samsung’s battery partners were in some cases pretty shoddy, and that its own designs put pressure on batteries. So it’s not just the battery manufacturers at fault here, and a big part of the problem is lack of quality control –Samsung’s third party investigators were able to find faults in batteries that hadn’t caught fire, and replicate the conditions in which devices caught fire. The big question is therefore why Samsung wasn’t able to do so. All this suggests a lack of care around product testing and likely also a rush to market for competitive reasons which then shortchanged the manufacturing process. I have confidence that Samsung will make big process changes going forward, but less confidence that the culture that led to these problems will change in the same way.
via Samsung Electronics Announces Cause of Galaxy Note7 Incidents in Press Conference – Samsung Global Newsroom (full coverage on Techmeme here)
The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.
Vote for or share this post
Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.