Lawsuit Alleges That Palms Damage Motherboards 437
schussat writes: "This brief AP article describes a lawsuit that alleges that syncing a Palm Pilot "damages or destroys the motherboards on certain PC brands." Does anyone know more or have experience with this? Is it even possible to cause damage? The article is not very detailed."
Why sue Palm? (Score:5, Insightful)
That raises an interesting question. You have a problem when two pieces of equipment interact. One of them blows up. Who to sue? The one that survives, assuming it "broke" the other one? (That seems to be the option taken) The one that breaks, assuming it was a piece of junk to start with? Both?
And the answer is.............THE RICHEST COMPANY, STUPID!!!
--
Come and get your $900 handheld? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is the kind of attitude that keeps Palm handhelds from costing $900. A firm that sells a $200 handheld cannot afford to do a failure analysis each time some customer claims that they want a free computer because the handheld 'blowed up the motherboard.' The manufacturers need to use statistics and engineering expertise to recognize if a given problem could conceivably be caused by their product. If not, they can't afford to spend time and money on it.
The argument that this company shipped more than 13 million units is hardly support for the premise that they can't screw up.
It is statistical evidence that Palm does not have a design flaw. It's hardly surprising that, with 13,000,000+ units sold, that two people may have experienced a motherboard failure coincident with Hotsyncing their Palms. Probably two others experienced motherboard failures when inserting CD-ROMs, two others had failures while opening Word, and so forth. Things fail and often that failure is coincident with some action, but it does not prove that the action caused the failure.
Both the computer hardware and software industries get away with far too little responsibility to ensure quality in their products.
Software, yes. They hide behind the argument that they are selling a license to use a product rather than a product, thus circumventing consumer protection laws. Hardware manufacturers are a different story. I have gotten notices of class action suits against Iomega, HP, and other firms whose products I have purchased. Intel has recalled CPUs, support chips, motherboards, etc. Hardware manufacturers receive lots of scrutiny.
Okay, let's hypothesize that you are running Palm. What would you do in this situation? Replace the motherboards as a goodwill gesture? That could lead to a loss of confidence in your product and might make others think "free motherboards", after which you would be awash in fraudulent claims. Do you send a team of engineers to investigate the claims? How much will that cost? Do you do it each and every time someone claims that your product caused some failure? Or do you look at statistics (number sold vs. number of reported failures) and your product's engineering and decide to stand by your product? Tell us how you think Palm should handle this.
Re:Not a very good article (Score:2, Insightful)
I haven't seen a Palm cradle, but if it was designed poorly - say as a huge capacitor on a cord that conveniently plugs into your motherboard's USB slot - they could conceivably be at fault. The palm cradle is supposed to be designed as a conduit for charge to flow, but only within certain specifications. I can't hook an arc welder up to my USB port and blame the motherboard manufacturer when the board is reduced to a charred mass of plastic and silicon. I can blame Palm if the design of their device is such that in as prescribed usage it exceeds design specifications.
Things don't accidently brush against ports usually, especially USB (or Firewire) ports, the electrical contacts are recessed from the exposed surface and have a rather small clearance around them.
The evils of coincidence (Score:3, Insightful)
Earlier this year, thousand of foolish parents refused to give their children MMR vaccines because shortly after it was given to a tiny percentage of children, they developed autism. Never mind that autism is detected at around teh same age as vaccinatin' time. Result? Lots of unvaccinated kids. Probably a few lawsuits.
What've got here? A couple of people whose motherboards blew while their pilots were plugged in. Result? Lawsuit. I bet Genius are delighted; they'd probably have been blamed if the first thing our litigious chums saw after the crash was a mouse.
Hmmm, so not user error at all. Right? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, really; "damages or destroys the motherboards on certain PC brands" - just a little too vague there for me to take it seriously. Especially with a company that's shifted as many units ("more than 13 million") as Palm.
UART chip would get the static (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not a very good article (Score:0, Insightful)
The ESD itself could not cause this bubbling, but it can cause an internal short, or cause the chip to go into a latchup state where power and ground are internally shorted, making the chip melt and bubble.
Chips don't come from the factory with bubbles already in them.
So, claiming that ESD damaged his serial port/motherboard does not make Greg a moron.
Claiming it is Palm's fault, or filing a lawsuit against Palm and not the PC/Motherboard manufacturer DOES make him/them a moron.
Hell, with Palm's sorry-ass financial state, I'd be surprised if they'd even be worth suing.
Re:Hmmm, so not user error at all. Right? (Score:2, Insightful)
You are absolutely right. I'm the only network admin for a company with about 200 users. We do have a couple of desktop support guys that work with the end-users. My job is mostly servers, and only end-user support when needed. We've had a HARD time finding good desktop people..people that HELP the user and don't call them "lusers" as soon as they walk away. We've finally gotten good people in but we're still dealing with all the damage the last group did.
A lot of computer admins and support people forget that their customer is the end-user...not the company they work for. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have jobs. So the top priority is to make them happy. My servers could be barely getting by, but if the users are happy I'd still have a job. Flip that around, if my servers were flying along with full backup and great performance but the users weren't happy and had problems I'd be fired.
What They're Doing... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you assume they're not hucksters, they are doing this to get people who may not have known about the problem to come out and join their effort to right the wrong.
If you're a realist, they are doing this because they are trying to get greedy and/or stupid people like themselves to jump on the bandwagon and get enough mass to force a settlement. Unintended Acceleration Syndrome, anyone?
Re:Not a very good article (Score:1, Insightful)
An important point to mention is that this would still have occurred if any static-charged object was brushed past the serial port, hence the weakness is contained within the PC. The Palm and cradle simply acted as a conduit for the charge to follow, which is to be expected by both PC manufacturer and customer as they're are by nature designed to allow charge to flow through them.
I don't buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
I called them with a stupid problem and they mailed me a new one. I'm guessing that the first Palm heard of this mess was when the reporter asked them about the suit. If they got an off the wall complaint like that, they would probably have gievn the customer a new box so they could tear apart the old one and see if it had actually happened. From a curiosity standpoint, it'd be worth the money. "I wonder if our product can do that?" Trying to duplicate the results wouldn't work. Getting your hands on a box that (allegedly) it's already happened to is much better.
Sounds like a couple of morons and a law firm willing to spend a couple of associates' time on a crap shoot. Business as usual.
Re:News: broken mother boards get broken more easi (Score:3, Insightful)
With people it's the "volts that jolt, but the mills (milliamps) that kill".
With electronics, even a low current, high voltage static shock is deadly.
If a static shock is enough to stimulate your nerve directly to cause sensation (after passing through a relatively high resistance of your skin), it is MORE than enough to punch a hole through the oxide layer of a CMOS chip, creating a new electrical connection (short) where one does not belong. This is permanent.
In addition, such a short can cause increased heat production which can cause thermal runaway (more heat and more current in a vicious cycle).
This can easily melt/burn a chip.
Re:Hmmm, so not user error at all. Right? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an example of the kind of attitude that keeps corporate users unhappy with their technical support. It's not right to assume that just because you can't imagine the causal connection between (your example) Office 97 and a printing problem that there isn't one. Haven't you personally had many experiences in which changing one variable (say, plugging a printer into a different USB port) immediately precedes something else, seemingly unrelated, "breaking"? No matter how fastidious you are, no matter what operating system you're using, an OS + thousands of programs + all the variability in hardware configurations in the world is far too complex a system for you to intuitively know whether the report of a problem's apparent cause is right.
If you're in a service profession, your job is to serve -- to assume that your customers are reporting, to the best of their ability, what they understand about the situation, and to use the information they give you, however flawed, to find the source of the problem. Up with "stupid users", I say.
The argument that this company shipped more than 13 million units is hardly support for the premise that they can't screw up. And it's a cop-out to lay the blame at the feet of pejoratively-labaled "users". Both the computer hardware and software industries get away with far too little responsibility to ensure quality in their products.
Voltage running through palm cradles (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is a general serial port "problem" (Score:1, Insightful)
Uh, no, you don't. You generally leave the cradle plugged into the serial port all the time, and the Palm gets plugged into that. The hot-plugging is all on the cradle's terms, not dependent on the serial port at all.
Dell Manufacture Motherboards? (Score:3, Insightful)
No way possible (Score:2, Insightful)
If the palm is damaging motherboards, then my wacom tablet, external modems, and other serial devices are doing the same....
Whoever is claiming this is either on crack, stupid, or just trying to make a quick buck.
They've got to be kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
Their computers probably just broke down and they're hoping Palm will settle out of court and give them new ones just to get them to shut up.
Skeptics (Score:2, Insightful)
"M$ Ambushes Users to Force Upgrades!!!"
"Micro$oft Turns Innocent Customers into Unsuspecting Prey!!!"
Stop and think a second. What if the Palm claim is true? Hasn't that possibility crossed anyone's minds? Admittedly it's very unlikely, but blind dismissal isn't prudent either.