Battery Recalls A Blow to Sony's Recovery 197
Yasser writes to mention the fallout from yet another Sony battery recall. Sony's stock hit a one-month low today on the news that they'd be pulling over a million batteries off the market. The recall is expected to have little impact financially, but has prompted the Japanese government into ordering Sony to look into the battery problem. From that article: "The ministry instructed the two companies to investigate the safety of Dell models Latitude, Inspiron and Precision and report on their findings by the end of August, the ministry said. Earlier this month, problems with battery cells supplied by Sony forced Dell to recall an unprecedented 4.1 million laptop batteries in the United States. "
Oh I'm sorry, Sony (Score:5, Funny)
Who came up with the idea anyway, that products must not harm the customer? Sheesh, won't somebody think of the profits!
Sony's problem. (Score:2)
Stringer was head of Sony US prior to becoming the first US born CEO of a major Japanese firm. In Sony US, content was were the profits were, and Stringer obviously thinks this will be true of Sony Worldwide too. He was behind Sony's DRM initiatives and the company certainly appears to be run with the content being king to the detriment of the electronics division.
If I was a shareholder, I'd be calling for his resignation.
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Re:Sony's problem. (Score:4, Funny)
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Also, I have repaired the power connector inside three laptops of different brands during the past year, and this is from a group of 15 student's machines, a failure of about 1 in 3, and one of them charred the PC board it was soldered to. Luckily, there was no fire. This cylindrical power jack sells for 35 cents to 75 cents. I wonder if the power designers on Laptops just do not pay at
Sony joins Toyota, GM, and Ford. (Score:3, Insightful)
Last year, Toyota (yes, Toyota) recalled about 2 million vehicles in the USA. (Contrast that number to the 200,000 vehicles recalled by Honda.) Simultaneously Toyota has grown to become the #2 automobile company in the USA, surpassing Ford.
We already know about GM and Ford. Since achieving domination of the global market in the 1970s, these companies produced s
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Starts producing shoddy products? Sony has been producing mostly crap consumer products all the way back to when I was doing TV production work in the early 90s. It's about time somebody actually noticed....
Seriously, I've basically been boycotting Sony for about five years now (except two pairs of $12 earbuds), ever since they stopped doing software updates for their Series I TiVo with major gaps in its functionality and massive software bugs (reboots every 30 days, once a year loses most of its chann
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From http://japan.seekingalpha.com/article/14649 [seekingalpha.com], Matsushita owns 52% of JVC. That makes JVC a subsidiary of Matushita, though not a wholly-owned subsidiary. Matsushita owns a controlling interest in JVC. A few years ago, you could draw a similar distinction between the different divisions of Sony, too, though I'm not sure this is the case these days. That doesn't make it a truly independent company in my book.
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Dell used to make some nice computers but everything done their today is evaluated at a cost analysis level and they hardly even have engineers as they have a fixed cost. No wonder it became junk?
Oddly Hyundia
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Huh? Honda's have a great track record. I have an Acura (fancy Honday) and only had one problem; the transmission, which had been recalled and fixed, and has been fine every since.
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Re:Your Jaguar (Score:3, Funny)
>My Jaguar was a beautiful car, but had the most bizarre set of problems I've ever heard of (a door and sunroof that opened only when they were in the right mood, occasionally working headlights, etc.)
I don't know much about the newer models, but this sort of thing is considered normal behavior for British cars of the 50s,60s, and 70s. The proper mental attitude to take is to look on it a charming quirkiness when your headlamps go out at night in a driving rainstorm. Of course, you are already used
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inside the whole time.
I agree with you, in the main.
Where we part is on the older US cars. They were simply
made, but robustly made. I think that the number of
cars from the 60's and early 70's on the road 30 years
later was higher than the number of 90's cars will be
30 years later. I dont expect much difference between
the US and foreign made cars.
Sony, some baloney (Score:3, Informative)
Really, I'm sorry that your profits - that you earned so hard by putting out piles of junk - now get eaten into by recalling said junk.
It all started to go downhill after Akio Morita died. The way I saw it his influence kept Sony's focus on high quality, innovative products. After his passing Sony became more interested in profitability over quality. The stories of Sony products not being up to snuff are no legion. Too bad. They had one of the best names, because of the reputation and now they're wr
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I remember a field service tech from DEC, in to work on our PDP system back in the mid 80's, telling of this service call to a foundry. Something stopped working and they found a the system schematic in the back of a filing cabinet which indicated there was something this company had in there, somewhere which ran everything. It was a PDP-4, running off an 8 inch floppy disk. Years past its installation in a corner of the foundry floor the foundry hand remodelled and put all sorts of structure, vents, wiri
Re:Oh I'm sorry, Sony (Score:4, Interesting)
Not being a Sony apologist here, but really, the batteries are junk?
The Apple recall involved 2 minor injuries in 9 complaints out of 1.8 million batteries. Anyone care to shine a light on any other industry and look for a product this reliable? Toasters, anyone? According to the US Consumer Product Safety website, one toaster model alone resulted in 1066 fires in a product that sold 234,000 units. The batteries in the Apple recall have been in laptops since 2003 - three years with 2 injuries and 9 complaints.
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A toaster burning down your house, you can recover. Being sent to Guantanamo... not so sure.
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Uhhh. I see Apple taking blame. Not on Slashdot, of course, but elsewhere.
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Sony's stock had seen better days before this recall. Investors are probably more concerned with who has to pay for the recall. Apple has had a few recent quality problems, and people are starting to take notice.
Re:Oh I'm sorry, Sony - (Not significant??) (Score:3, Insightful)
Safety is not a matter of "It is not important because it happened to someone far away." The potential
Should be sorry (Score:2)
That said... a megacorp has a "one month low"? What kind of news is that? Sounds like someone trying to make a story where there isn't one.
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Well... Unless you're buying your product from Dr. Kevorkian
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Thinkpad battery good? (Score:2, Interesting)
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OTOH, I would also make sure my home owner's insurance covers fire and is paid up.
Lenovo says so... (Score:3, Informative)
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To be correct, some of them are made by Sony. Lenovo also ships batteries from Sanyo and Panasonic. You can find out from where your battery comes with Lenovo's Parts Lookup [ibm.com] tool. If you're running Linux and have the tp_smapi module loaded, following command should also do it:
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(For those that don't know... Sanyo cannot make a battery for a ThinkPad that doesn't rattle horribly. However, Sanyo's batteries don't EXPLODE, at least.
"Sony's stock hit a one-month low"? (Score:5, Funny)
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Huh? The comment about stock price was made (I believe) to indicate that there is a growing concern in the financial sector about Sony's future profitability -- which is something no one on Slashdot should be surprised about, given the kind of coverage we tend to see here[1]. It demonstrates that the Street is as aware of Sony's myriad problems as your typical non-fanboy nerd.
Also, 2001 killed off the marginally unsuccessful
Yeah... (Score:2)
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Just in case you were serious: A "one month low" isn't a "once a month low". It is "the lowest it has been in the past month". That needn't happen once a month -- if the stock is rising it will happen rarely, if the stock is falling it will happen often.
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Sony's stock hit a one-month low
Yeah, that's pretty irrelevant.
What I do wonder about is the possibility of airlines saying "No More Laptops On Board", or at a minimum - "No Li* Batteries." There have already been ground fires and inflight fires - fortunately all survived. But it's not hard to imagine airlines restricting batteries in the future. No doubt the Japanese government is concerned about this as well. That's probably why the ministries are beginning their investigations.
Sony seems to be missing
What hasnt been a blow..... (Score:5, Insightful)
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2) Please, saying GBA is directly competing in the market with DS and GBA would be like saying PS1 competed directly against PS2, GameCube, XBox. The idea just doesn't stand.
3) If I were to go to EB and ask how many DSs and PSPs they had, they'd have more DSs because of people trading in the originals for lites.
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Re:What hasn't been a blow..... (Score:2)
I dislike Sony, at the moment (Score:3, Interesting)
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That said, I think Sony is really going to screw up the consumer electronics market if they have their way. Rather than play along
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Re:I dislike Sony, at the moment (Score:5, Interesting)
Overhyped a difficult and expensive PS3
Overpriced a lower quality UMD
Restricted the PSP to UMD and flash sticks
Released a rootkit on "CD"
Manufactured defective LiIon batteries
Released stupidly restricted "MP3" players that didn't play MP3s until 2005
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VHS is inferior in quality...cheaper tho.
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Apart from the prestigious factor, I don't think the quality justify Sony's price tag nowadays. The playstation series is still good. Other than that, Sony is a tech and trend follower rather than leader. Its quality is really just so and so (btw, we got to
More troubling than it seems (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm talking about the average consumer who's unaware of rootkits, sonicstage or ejecting MMORPG users into space.
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It's anecdotal, but I've simply had terrible luck with Sony stuff. I'm sure I'll have serveral people come out and lambast me for it, but these days if I
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Seriously, their reputation for good hardware has plummetted in the last ten years too.
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Warning label on products -- (Score:2)
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No worries (Score:5, Funny)
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I know your post was a tongue-in-cheek, but it brings up an interesting (in my mind) point about Sony's profitability in re: the PS3:
Since Sony will be losing cash with each PS3 produced and sold (in the US, not sure about Japan or the UK or Europe)... wouldn't lagging demand and lower production of the PS3 be beneficial to their short-term interests? At what sales v
What happens when you return a Battery? (Score:2)
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Technically you're never without your battery. But they suggest you leave out your old battery permanantly and use the laptop with the power cord attached. I'll keep using my battery while I wait for the new one. It doesn't get very hot and I haven't had any
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Who pays? (Score:2)
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You might as well do it anyway, since your old battery was most likely partially worn-out anyway.
I, for example, have a 2.5 year old iBook with a battery that's shot -- it lasts less than half an hour now. Lucky for me, it's part of the recall, saving me $100! : )
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NPR was talking about the Apple recall and said that Sony was paying for the recall or at least part of it.
Sony Batteries (Score:2, Funny)
Did Sony supply Apple with their crappy batteries, too?
strongbad says, "hey, my laptop asplode!"
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Some Apple batteries, yes.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/24/ 1737245 [slashdot.org]
https://support.apple.com/ibook_powerbook/batterye xchange/ [apple.com] (Not the be confused with the recall from 2005)
No problems really! (Score:3, Funny)
I wouldn't be surprised... (Score:2)
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Look at the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
Battery memory (Score:2)
"One-month low"?????? (Score:2)
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1.8 Million Mac G4/iBook batteries, too! (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=2006082
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=2006082
Affected ranges of serial number prefixes are as follows:
12-inch iBook G4, battery model: A1061
ZZ338 through ZZ427
3K429 through 3K611
6C510 through 6C626
12-inch PowerBook G4, battery model: A1079
ZZ411 through ZZ427
3K428 through 3K611
15-inch PowerBook G4, battery models: A1078 and A1148
3K425 through 3K601
6N530 through 6N551
6N601
To see if your PowerBook or iBook is affected, visit
https://support.apple.com/ibook_powerbook/battery
An obvious bid to take over the world (Score:2)
Remember the burned lap from last year? (Score:2)
Sony's Done (Score:2)
So which Sony executives will... (Score:2)
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A Lithium Ion cell is typically about as big as your first finger, give or take, both in length and diameter. Unless Sony Ericsson is still building brick phones, it's safe to say that they don't use Lithium ion cells. :-)
More to the point, Sony Ericsson phones use Lithium Polymer cells, which to my knowledge have not been recalled. It's a similar technology, but they are not the same, and a failure/recall in one does not necessarily imply a need to recall the other or vice-versa.
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Oh you mean rechargable batteries in standard AA, AAA, C, D packages huh? Lets assume you are using NiMH AA batteries and they get 2200 mAh. Apple claims the Lithium Polymer battery in the macbook gets about 60Wh. Now lets do a little math:
2.2Ah * 1.5V = 3.3 Wh
So basically you would need about 20 AA batteries to su
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On the downside, it was only quite recently that (ironically) Sony discovered [wikipedia.org] how they could be used safely at all in consumer applications.
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It upsets me that Sony wont even acknowledge they are defective. If Apple and Dell disagree then Sony could stand for a class action lawsuit agaisnt them. They are the same batteries afterall.
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Oh yeah, sony ericsson phones are spectacular! I love how when you press the side buttons (what should be volume) the "status" pops up, it's a good thing that they made the status so easy to get to because I have a need to check that my "profile" is "okay" on a normal basis. I also love the great feat