IBM and Lenovo Recall Sony Batteries 111
digihome writes "IBM and Lenovo are recalling 168,500 ThinkPad notebook battery packs in the United States and another 357,000 worldwide, saying the Sony-made lithium-ion batteries can 'cause overheating, posing a fire hazard to consumers.'" The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has more details.
E-gad... (Score:2, Funny)
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I thought you could only win a Darwin award once. After that you are merely an example/warning to others
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Maybe if all your relatives are identical twins of yourself. Or you're from Kentucky. The rest of us have a little more genetic diversity in our families.
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Attempt at joke (Score:3, Funny)
Q. What does Microsoft call customers?
A. Beta testers
New tech joke...
Q. What does Sony call customers?
A. EOD. (for all you non-military types that Explosive Ordinance Disposal)
Place a curse on Sony [i-curse.com]
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This leaves only Acer and HP (Score:5, Interesting)
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anyone know?
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Sanyo does have all the letters of Sony in it. With an "a" added for good measure. Maybe you're on to something!
I don't believe they're related, though.
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Some info on the HP recall:
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml06/06145. html [cpsc.gov]
http://bpr.hpordercenter.com/ebpr/landingpage.aspx [hpordercenter.com]
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Re:This leaves only Acer and HP (Score:5, Funny)
Spokespersons at HP defended the batteries, saying that laptop batteries routinely exploded in use: "It's a standard industry practice".
HP's stock rose on analysts predictions that sales of replacement laptops would surge following the wave of melted hardware. "They were going to have to buy all new laptops to run Vista anyway.", said one. "This way, the customers can stick it to their insurance companies."
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Saw that one coming... (Score:4, Interesting)
...after reading this little story [engadget.com].
I have a battery from Sanyo, unfortunately, so no free, new battery for me :(
Who's the bad guy now? (Score:5, Insightful)
So why were they so bad for recalling the batteries months before everyone else again?
Or I guess a better, and more on-topic, question would be: Why is it taking everyone else so long to innitiate a recall?
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Because recalls are ugly, expensive, lawsuit-exposing, and gives mostly bad PR to whoever has to initiate one. You get some small props for being responsible, but it sort of falls short in the big fat benefits vs. risks calculator.
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Lawsuit exposing? Assuming your computer doesn't catch on fire from the problem, what is your cause of action? They're offering to replace the defective part for you at no charge.
If your computer DID catch on fire from it, you may have a suit--but NOT recalling the batteries if you knew about the problem would open you to a far greater lawsuit than recalling them. If the fire occurred after the recall, you may even escape liability--at least in part.
All that said, I can't agree with your conclusion t
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Ford Explorer (which faced a TON of lawsuits before and after the recall)
Vioxx
a whole host of other drugs...
I distinctly remember recent lawyer commercials trumpeting recalls as admissions of responsibility (anyone heard of James Sokolove? yeah, me too - now that his name is splayed across my TV screen quite often).
Now take Joe Schmoe who shows up at the hospital with burns on his legs... and happens to own a laptop... (whether the burns were actually caused by the batteries or not)...
Re:Who's the bad guy now? (Score:4, Funny)
Narrator: A new battery by my company ships out in a new laptop. The battery heats up. The laptop burns with all the data trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of batteries in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Business woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?
Narrator: You wouldn't believe.
Business woman on plane: Which battery company do you work for?
Narrator: A major one.
Dell still sucks. (Score:2)
If you go look back at the story, you see that Dell admits to having known about the problem 10 months before the recall and was accused of worse by a former tech [slashdot.org] at the time of recall [slashdot.org]. They had the volume of sales required to notice the problem but did nothing useful for at least a year.
It is too
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Simple reason: you need a real world victim to force Sony to foot the bill. Or else, Sony will act as if nothing has happened.
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Why is it taking everyone else so long to innitiate a recall?
A.... times B... times C.... equals X.... if X is less than the cost of a recall.. we dont do one.....
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I don't know about anyone else, but I somewhat know Lenovo's side.
Working for a Thinkpad University has a few benefits, one of them is talking to Lenovo Engineers directly at conferences, where we share our experiences with the Thinkpad with people inside the company. This results in better designs for our students. The R60 build quality I believe is an example of this, especially comparing it against the R51's we used in the past.
Our last conferenc
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A fire hazard? You don't say! (Score:2, Funny)
I would [engadget.com] never have guessed. [howardforums.com]
I guess (Score:1)
From Lenovo.com (Score:5, Informative)
This involves systems sold between February 2005 and September 2006, including:
ThinkPad R Series (R51e, R52, R60, R60e)
ThinkPad T Series (T43, T43p, T60)
ThinkPad X Series (X60, X60s)
Yes, my one month old T60 too is on the list. Though I will wait out till the initial rush dies out.
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BINGO!
(now if only I could win something like "the lottery")
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Why wait? My wife sent in the battery for her powerbook the day the recall was announced and got a replacement inside of a week. You won't need to send your faulty one in until you get the new one.
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"Yes, my one month old T60 too is on the list. Though I will wait out till the initial rush dies out."
For tradition, shouldn't you have said:
"Yes, my one month old T60 too is on the list. Though I will wait out till %@^@^%#@%@%@! NO CARRIER"
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Yay, I've got a Sanyo!
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I hope you don't mean that literally. I mean we're talking battery bombs here!
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My original laptop battery developed a fault pretty quickly. IBM replaced it. It seems that they replaced a weak battery with an explosive one...!
Not good for Sony (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't forget the digital music player that couldn't play MP3s
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Piled on top of that your three examples and it's stupendously clear the company has as much allure as does the British kitchen.
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Add to this the worst CD/DVD media in the world. Their disks literally decay in 1-2 years, where all my other disks, in the same conditions, are in pristine state.
Have Sony VAIO batteries been recalled yet? (Score:2, Interesting)
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In that case, it would be Sony "not [being] prone to the same defect that other OEMs have been subjected to," and would look a whole lot like a supplier's sabotage of a competitor.
I know if I was Dell or Lenovo or Apple, I would seriously consider terminating all POs with Sony's name on them.
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So my guess is that the battery issue is not Sony in general, but Sony batteries manufactured at certain facilities?
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Threat to airline security (Score:1)
Incidents/Injuries: Lenovo has received one confirmed report of a battery overheating and causing a fire that damaged the notebook computer. The incident, which occurred within an airport terminal as the user was boarding an airplane, caused enough smoking and sparking that a fire extinguisher was used to put it out. There was minor property damage and no injuries were reported.
Can this become a threat to airline security?
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I can see the movie quotes now:
"Get these mother fucking Sonys off my mother fucking plane!"
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NOW I know how China did that fusion! (Score:1)
Energy Problems (Score:2)
We are having major problems with fossil fuels and the impact the byproducts of getting energy that way. Batteries, which are very important to many forms of electric cars, are very difficult to scale up without being dangerous in a small percentage of cases.
Whomever finds the silver bullet of energy will become the next richest group in the world (and incidently save the planet from boiling).
Quick check (Linux) (Score:5, Informative)
$ grep model
Then compare the output to this list: The value returned is the ASM P/N (*not* the FRU!)
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This is straght from Lenovo:
Along with the part number, every battery has a unique identifier known as the 11S bar code. This bar code is key to identifying if the battery is affected by the recall. If you believe you have one or more of these affected batteries, please visit the recall web site at http://www.lenovo.com/batte [lenovo.com]
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Just a point, on breezy it appears that the info captured in the info file is the FRU *not* the ASM P/N.
In addition, even if the battery P/N match it does not necessarily mean that the battery is subject to a recall. I spent a couple of hours this morning and of the 15 or so batteries with the ASM:92P1088 FRU:92P1089 match only 3 were subject to a recall. However http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Tp_smapi/ [thinkwiki.org] looks very interesting in this regard.
Geoff
hum (Score:1)
when Apple recalled the general consensus was: "yay new battery!"
Actually... (Score:3, Funny)
Check Your Battery from Linux (Score:4, Informative)
My output is listed below and does not appear to be affected ...
The list of recalled models is here [cpsc.gov].
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What about the Vaio? (Score:1)
In unrelated news... (Score:2)
gah! (Score:2)
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YOu should check T42s anyway, if you bought them 2nd, since they may have had their batteries replaced.
Fusion (Score:1)
It's just the latest in Sony's DRM plan (Score:1)
Stage 1 "Operation Rootkit"
Stage 2 "Operation Fry The Thieving Bastards"
VAIO laptops.. (Score:2)
Don't they use their own batteries, or are they somehow different to the ones they sell to other people???
Is that all of them yet? (Score:2)
Is that about every laptop manufacturer on the planet yet in the past year or so? Can we finally just accept that you're g
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Anonymous Cow^^^^^^^^^Professional Dell Blogger
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Sony does most things pretty well, but some things wrong (backdoor malware on music CD's is another example.)
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Um, No. I don't think you realize how large and diverse Sony is.
Sony is in three main lines of business: consumer electronics (the Walkman, TVs, boomboxes, playstation, stereos), professional and business electronics (telephones and telecommunications, computer peripherals, semiconductors, broadcasting equipment, medical imaging, display systems, factory automation systems), and entertainment (music