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. "
Re:Who pays? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What hasnt been a blow..... (Score:1, Informative)
Sony CCDs are also used in some Canon and Nikon cameras, among others
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 wrecking it over profits and rushing things to market before adequate testing.
Re:No worries (Score:3, Informative)
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 volume does the market consider PS3 saturation high enough to make Blu-Ray viable as a revenue generator?
Re:Sony joins Toyota, GM, and Ford. (Score:3, Informative)
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 channel lineup, requires manual intervention for even the most basic two-show conflict resolution, etc.). That was the last straw, preceded by a string of defective headphones, dead camcorders (one Hi-8, one mini-DV), horrendously overpriced parts for repairing their products (quoted $350 for a piece of plastic containing the power switch and record start button), and a TV that won't turn on unless you preheat it with a hairdryer.
Matsushita (Panasonic/JVC) isn't much better, though. I had two JVC VCRs of the same model (HR-S6700U) bought at the same time die (won't turn on) three months apart. Far too consistent time to failure to be random. I'm pretty certain there's a design flaw in there somewhere. And their products started going downhill rapidly after that model. The model I bought two years later (HR-S6900U) had so many obvious design flaws that I hardly where to begin. They turned off the ability to disable OSD, replaced the heads which on the previous model never needed cleaning with cheaper, crappy heads that had to be cleaned at LEAST once a week and often several times in a single day to keep from getting white spots all over the picture on playback, changed the mechanism so that instead of being nearly frame accurate, its counter would drift as much as ten frames just by pausing and hitting play a couple times, and generally turned a wonderful, semi-pro VCR into a junky POS toy that was completely unusable for anything other than playing back tapes in your home theater, and really, not even usable for that.
Life's too short to put up with products that have to be replaced every two or three years. Life is doubly too short to put up with companies that intentionally degrade the quality of their products to force customers to either replace them or move up to a higher price category of equipment.
Re:Sony's problem. (Score:3, Informative)
Lenovo says so... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who's next? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Yeah... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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
Re:Sony's problem. (Score:3, Informative)
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 attention to the quality of the components they specify. I find it hard to believe that there are not thousands of laptops requiring replacement because of broken connectors.
Re:More troubling than it seems (Score:1, Informative)
Thanks, best chuckle I've had on an otherwise shitty day. Can't speak towards computers but much of the rest Sony builds is shit. From being a world leader of home entertainment electronics they've gone to the only manufacturer banned by our internal purchasing. Customer support has broken free fall records. Open the box to find a defective item? Tough shit pal, no replacements. Send it to an authorized Sony repair depot. The one near you is staffed by moneys with irons? Tough shit again pal, send it back until they fixed it. BTW, enjoy those Mexican made TVs, while they work.
Sony's been in the hands of lawyers and accountants since their hardware and media divisions first amalgamated. Fuck them, good bye and good riddance.