They have spent a huge amount of money on marketing this phone. I wrote a week or so back it could be the end of Samsung and people told me I was an idiot - they make so many other things, their spread is so broad, they can just produce the next phone and move on.
This has done untold damage to their brand in the eyes of the average consumer and has wasted so much money, I think they are going to need to get smart, and quickly.
First, all those sales are now refunded. That is going to hurt cashflow and cause ripples across the entire business. Sure, it's not going to hurt some of their industrial projects but hampered cash flow is like having a respiratory disease: most people who get pneumonia don't die of the pneumonia, but organs shutting down because of the lack of oxygen they get as a result of the pneumonia.
Secondly, a lot of marketing dollars are now wasted, gone. They did a global campaign around the Olympics for this phone - it doesn't get much bigger. Just be glad that they didn't launch this in early February otherwise they would have taken every Super Bowl slot available. Those who do remember their advertising around this spend will remember it as them talking about a phone that scared airlines into thinking it might take down an aircraft.
Finally, many consumers won't buy Samsung phones again as a minimum when they're first released, maybe never as a worst case scenario. This has done long-term damage, we can't deny it.
I know a lot of people are fans of Samsung, and it's true they are a great company, but objectively this has got to be damaging to them.
I completely disagree. People love shiny and they have a short memory even though there's this wonderful thing called the internet that can remember things for them. All Samsung has to do is come out with something shiny and people will be buying it and blogging about it.
People still buy Ford cars even though they made the Pinto and their SUVs used Firestone tires. People still buy Toyota without even a thought as to whether the brakes work. People still buy any car whatsoever with an airbag without worrying if it'll spontaneously explode and, if not kill them, shred their face.
I agree with the disagreement, we are also not talking about some one trick pony which solely depends on successfully selling this thing. Samsung as a whole and even the consumer electronics part alone is a massive and diversified conglomerate. They should be easily able to swallow the financial losses of such a failure in a single product category and let it survive during a bit of a lean period until customers regain trust which may even be not that long.
Samsung's profits are dominated by its mobile unit, which has given the division much increased power within the overall organization. (I was employed by a supplier to Samsung mobile, by even without that this is public knowledge).
The rest of the company has much thinner margins. This undeniably hurts their business.
But virtually everyone knows that they have exploded, has been told to shut them off on flights, has older relatives asking them if their S4 is save, etc... This is not going away, especially since they've been unable to figure out what's going wrong, and have just told people to turn it off.
Besides, driving is really dangerous, but calling your girlfriend isn't supposed to leave you with full thickness burns.
Samsung SDI is going to struggle in a World with cheap coal prices and political inclinations (cf. Trump campaign) to not care about environmental impacts.
Samsung Heavy Industries is already struggling because of market demands for new container ships dropping off sharply in recent years - there has been a glut of supply for some years.
Their Engineering and Construction groups have moderate turnover on focused/strategic projects that go to lowest-cost bidders, they can't keep the entire company going.
They have a reasonable sized Financial Services group of companies, but they're not exactly global players, and it's going to be hard to see them picking up enough growth to keep things going if their consumer electronics division flounders.
They have a group dedicated to health and medical equipment, that might do well, but the largest market for healthcare in the World (the US), is currently playing political football with that industry, so, you know, tricky.
Their washing machines are exploding, and demand for products like air conditioning remains high but might be curbed by issues in the power sector within developing nations as people try to figure out what that infrastructure looks like on the 10-year, 25-year and 50-year terms, which again, they are fighting in another group.
They have a ton of electronics businesses that will continue to do well, but ironically because Apple is one of their biggest customers for their products.
It's not obvious to me that they are more robust than Nokia was. They have a lot of risks across a lot of their groups, with their phone division being perhaps the lowest risk group of the lot.
Good luck to them, but the Samsung fanbois (and yes, there are many of them), need to realise this is going to be a tough time for the company. For the sake of the smaller stockholders and the employees, I hope they get through this.
So they have a massively diversified business that faces many risks, just as others in those sectors do, but which is generally doing pretty well.
One phone will not kill this.
Having just bought a new Samsung washing machine, the story that they are exploding seems to have passed me by.
I'm not a fanboi - I'm typing this on a Nexus 6 and considering another motorola next - I just think that saying this might be fatal is somewhat silly.
I think "exploding" was an unfortunate choice of words, and that was supposed to mean they are selling a lot(they seem to be popular in Brazil and are considererd high end).
Samsung is too much of South Korea's GDP to go bankrupt. For Samsung to fail, the Korean economy would have to also fail, which is possible but unlikely.
I think that if you compare Samsung's Note 7 to Nokia's Burning Platform, the prospects for Samsung are significantly better (Nokia not only destroyed the value of 100% of their inventory but also all of their future inventory until the OS changeover happened; Samsung has a branding problem but can release another device).
Honestly, they should just rename it to something else (at the very least not the Note, but maybe even call it something other than Samsung in the US).
Edit: I do agree with your supposition that mobile is the primary revenue driver for Samsung, but I don't actually think they're generating a profit from mobile any more. I continue to contend that the only company that makes a profit on mobile is Apple and they continue to dominate that market for reasons that are fairly obvious (supply chain, silicon superiority, and software that works faster for the workloads consumers run on their devices).
Samsung hovers around what 20% of South Korean GDP?
Nokia was around 4-5% of Finland and some say its loss was the best thing to happen of the country's tech sector. I haven't seen any real analysis however.
Isn't that backwards? (ie. if Samsung failed, South Korea's economy would take a massive hit?)
I think this will hurt Samsung significantly but not fatally. They'll come back with a nice fancy new phone (although they may not re-use the Note moniker) and they'll price it at barely above break-even to encourage people to give them another chance, and people will love them again.
> Isn't that backwards? (ie. if Samsung failed, South Korea's economy would take a massive hit?)
They are both true. If Samsung faltered, the Korean economy would take a hit, but the government would almost certainly prop it up such that it wouldn't actually fail.
Presumably a bailout would take the form of an injection of liquidity sourced from sovereign debt denominated in KRW, much like the US bank bailout a few years ago. If it were large enough, it could depress the won against other global currencies. In the limiting case, the Koreans can always -- if they really need to -- print money until their exports get attractive again. People may not want to buy Samsung phones, but they'll certainly buy Samsung steel or Samsung heavy industrial equipment, if the price is right.
Countries can do this funny thing called "print money" to save failing businesses. Sure, that's bad for the economy too, but potentially better than the alternative.
Yes, Samsung is going to suffer, that's certain. But failing, as in going bankrupt? No. They are simply too important for South Korea to let them go bankrupt.
But you backpedalled on that point already as well, and no one, even the biggest fanboy, would argue that they are not going to have large problems. Like every large company somewhere on its track.
They are too big to fail. Worst case the government would step in and bail them out. If they failed the all their suppliers would be hurt it would be shockwave through the Korean economy. Same reason why US bailed out AIG, GM, etc.
They are also a sort of crown jewel for South Korea, and probably far above the "too big to fail" threshold there. If worse came to worst, they'd be bailed out by the government.
They're not going anywhere as a corporation.
I'd expect a certain amount of bloodletting in their leadership, depending on exactly how bad the recall and consequent damage to their mobile electronics business is. But it's not an existential threat to the entire organization.
As a person that owns both a Samsung Washer & Dryer (they just did a recall on top load washers I believe), a Samsung Refrigerator, and at one point a Samsung television, I can assure you all of their products (that I have owned or currently own) are poorly designed, and more so, poorly manufactured garbage. I will never knowingly buy a Samsung product again. I replaced the TV after it came out about their efforts to track user behavior, etc.. The TV and its apps were garbage anyhow. Stay away from Samsung.
OTOH, the Galaxy S3 wasnt too bad, but perhaps that's b/c I have been conditioned to bad phones since every phone I've owned since the Motorola flip & the Razr has been complete shit.
I'm quite happy with my Samsung TV - picture quality is great.
The remote is a terrible piece of shit, and I disabled the "Smart" TV features the moment that thing showed be a goddamn ad, but as a front end for my Apple TV/Playstation 4 it's quite good.
Except you can't fully disable ads unless they've patched it in the last 6 or so months. I had a very long back and forth with them about it and they kept denying it until finally admitting that it was impossible to disable. Worse, they were using the notification bar to advertise gamefly. Not cool. Keep in mind the TV I had was their flagship first gen 4k tv. There's no excuse for putting ads on a nearly 5k dollar tv.
I bought a Samsung 4k TV ~1 year ago, and turning off the Smart TV features (smart hub, or whatever they called it) most definitely turned off the ads.
I'm not actually getting 4k video out of my TV, (since neither the apple tv or playstation support it), but I'm not terribly concerned about that (as I can't tell the difference at the distance I sit from my television).
I wanted a dumb TV anyway, but costco didn't have any at the size I was looking for when I purchased it.
Sounds like they may have fixed the options then. Before if you opted out of everything it would basically just ignore it. My solution was to just disconnect it from the internet. I haven't used their interface since and haven't had a need to since I have an nvidia shield which works wonderfully.
Yeah, I was pretty miffed that my brand new $2k TV was showing me ads. Fortunately I didn't actually want a "Smart" TV, so I was content just turning that feature off.
Out or curiosity where would it show ads to you? When it was in sleep mode or while you browsing something? This is the fist I have heard of this. I find this outrageous.
Haha, certainly nothing so scientific. The picture just looks good to me, and compared with other TVs that I saw on display it was better than a number of the other options that were both cheaper and more expensive.
Well, I've seen many Galaxy S2s used in the worst of conditions. Right now I'm regularly marveling at an S6 Edge that has been dropped, and even purposely thrown to the wall by the owner, still work flawlessly with a cracked screen (even missing a big chunk of glass in the corner) and back... Pretty impressive.
But then again, I have an LG Optimus L9 that I thought would kick the bucket tomorrow for over a year now, and it keeps working...
> This has done untold damage to their brand in the eyes of the average consumer
You'd be surprised about how much of the general public even knows that there is a type of Samsung phone that can spontaneously combust, and the proportion of those people that care and will continue to remember that fact when they are looking for a new phone is also going to be quite small.
I have had to explain the story to friends who gave me blank looks when I explained that my Samsung S7 was not the kind that exploded...
This time almost everybody knows. With every flight announcing "you can use your electronic devices now, in airplane mode - except for the Galaxy Note 7, that must stay off during all the trip", people won't forget for a while.
Your last paragraph contradicts your overall point. To me, that reads like your friends associated it with the entire brand, not that they were unaware of the exploding phones. That's worse for Samsung.
No, they were unaware that there was an exploding phone, let alone a Samsung exploding phone. It surprised me, as some of them were pretty technically literate.
It may not be the end of Samsung, but I sure hope that this will mark the end of an era in smartphone design -- an era during which everyone rushed to make the thinnest, flattest, flimsiest phone ever, durability be damned.
There have been reports of ultrathin phones from several different brands bending and cracking in people's back pockets for years. Honestly I'm impressed that manufacturers lasted so long without a bunch of explosions, given the energy density of these fragile gadgets. I also don't quite see the point of anything thinner than 9-10 millimeters.
Lack of durability may have been more acceptable in an era of incredibly fast innovation on the hardware front (planned obsolescence, hurray!) but now that most flagship phones have comparable features, perhaps someone will begin to design phones that last more than a year or two. With replaceable batteries, of course.
This. I just don't understand the thinness obsession. I was given an iPhone by my work recently and I am amazed how impractical it is. It's slippery to hold, difficult to pick up and just incredibly fragile. I was recommended to buy a case for it ASAP. There's basically no chance it will survive a drop. Personally I think the design is awful. It's the "emperor's new clothes".
That's what's so amusing about this. The incredibly thin phones have to be put in incredibly bulky cases. A super-thin iPhone in a case is as bulky as my Cat B15 ruggedized smartphone, which will survive being run over by a truck and has a bigger battery.
If it boots them out of the prestige-pricing range into the "it's got every feature of the rest for a hundred bucks less, you'd be crazy not to" range that Google used to inhabit with Nexus, that could be a good thing...
I think you overestimate the ability of consumers to discriminate between phones. Samsung intentionally named their phones "Samsung Galaxy S7" and "Samsung Note 7". Lots of people don't know that only one of the two is exploding (anecdotally, my wife and her parents).
I think this is going to hurt them a lot but it's nowhere near enough to "end" them. Also, as an S7 edge owner I'm more than satisfied with the device. My next phone (2 years later) is probably going to be from Samsung again, unless apple actually makes a compelling phone again.
I think there would be relatively less people who won't buy a samsung because of this event. There are other much larger reasons.
They're estimated to have to have to pay over (or have losses of) $5 billion! The class action lawsuits haven't even started yet, and you bet your ass InQTel, Facebook, Apple shell corps are going to be funding those lawsuits to the billions if it goes there.
It's a pretty nasty trick the Americans pulled on Samsung, and we'll see how this plays out in the end. It was bound to happen as Samsung completely began to dwarf Apple, and snubbed the CIA operated Facebook. Taking on American tech corps is akin to taking on the NSA and CIA.
For now their best bet is to narrow down the culprits, reassess who their friends are if they have any (I think they're heavily dependent on Americans). It's obvious there's a move to break Samsung apart and to feed their remains to the American tech corps, so Samsung will likely have to play second fiddle to US intel lackeys like Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc...
> This has done untold damage to their brand in the eyes of the average consumer..
This seems like a huge overreaction, even if their phones are exploding - why would that matter if I'm looking at a monitor? They've produced millions of non-exploding product, so this is just some mistake that dropped in.
The average consumer won't remember this in a month.
If this were the case, VW would surely have abandoned ship and shuttered their factories. They haven't. Similar situation with BP - they are not in the doldrums.
People have short-term memories and will vote with their wallets if they see a new product that seems "worth the cost" of ownership.
> If this were the case, VW would surely have abandoned ship and shuttered their factories. They haven't.
VW has a huge customer base in enterprise and government. As long as trucks are not affected by faked emission tests, both won't dump Volkswagen. And even if: many large corporations and government institutions run their own car/truck repair shops, sometimes even their own parts storage (the most extreme is certainly UPS) in order to save money - and you can't just switch over all that to a new manufacturer.
> Similar situation with BP - they are not in the doldrums.
For gas directly sold by BP to customers: who cares? Consumers only look at the pump price, they're not as politicized as e.g. during Brent Spar 1995. The other branches / customers of bp are all corporate, where there is no incentive except prices to switch suppliers.
I've heard actually that people are having an enormous difficulty getting refunds for the phones they already purchased, with Samsung responding to their requests with verbose but meaningless legalese.
This is actually the reason I already avoid Samsung. They seem to have abysmal customer service in the US. Particularly compared to Apple for mobile devices.
They are still selling S7/Edge by the truckloads - not to mention old versions of the S phones and Notes. And some consumers are even buying their incomprehensible A/C/J/E phones. And they are introducing S8 in March, and given lack of viable competition on high-end Android it will sell like hotcakes.
The damage will be to their stock and missed profits from Note 7 sales, as well as some loss to lawsuits. Maybe it will teach them to not rush phones or listen to engineering. Who knows, maybe they'll even add removable batteries or fix the AMOLED flicker.
>Maybe it will teach them to not rush phones or listen to engineering
Why do you assume that it wasn't an engineering screw up to begin with? They had two chances and didn't get it right. Not all technical problems are the fault of MBA's.
And I get down voted... Stay happy in your silos HN
A creative marketing agency could totally spin that the phone was so packed with power that it couldn't work, but this new shiny thing is even better and completely safe.
Will this hurt them in the short run? Yes, but unless they die before the next phone is out and gets rave reviews from at least a subgroup, this won't matter long term - does anybody even remember antenna gate?
end of samsung, come this time next year most of the public won't even remember the issue. then consider that many just tune this type of news out anyway if they have had no issues.
tech sites tend to over exaggerate impact of technologies because many fail to associate the fact common interest brought them to the discussion site in the first place
okay, I give, how did that comment offend? Samsung will have little or no discernible impact from this event. Techies tend to think to the world thinks like they do and rotates around their ideas but we are such a small segment that we tend to miss the big picture.
It will definitely harm the company-as-a-brand, though. People following the news who haven't owned a Samsung phone before might well be put off any Samsung device, ignoring the distinction between the Note and other lines. If it were only about the phone model, the fallout might be much smaller, but it's now become about Samsung's appalling handling of the problems too.
Hell, I owned Galaxy phones for the last 5 years, and even I will be hesitant buying the next Galaxy and will probably wait a few months to see, if any problems show up.
And their SSDs have hardware design flaws making them read slower and slower until the read speed of old cells is down to 1-2megabytes/second... of advertised 550megabytes/s.
Remember that? It affected all Samsung EVO drives, which is marketing speak for all Samsung SLC based drives, which means budget drives, the Pro versions based on MLC were unaffected.
But, the way Samsung handled my case, to deny warranty, and in general case to release an .exe file on their website called "Slow fix something.exe", has me stay away from Samsung SSDs for ever.
The other "fix" they had was to release a firmware which would shuffle data around in the background - reading and rewriting/updating cells - so as to appear that there is no problem - but read speed would anyway decrease with age, and increase the write-cycles on the cells even if the SSD is idle... Fun.
I recommend SanDisk Extreme Pro -- they are awesome good value drives - may exist newer on the market now, but last autumn those were and still are the best SSDs ever.
>which is marketing speak for all Samsung SLC based drives, which means budget drives
Consumer SSDs use MLC. Enterprise SSDs use SLC almost exclusively or eMLC which has less issues than consumer grade MLC.
MLC is about storing multiple bits in a single tiny cell. This results in more capacity at the cost of total write cycles, read errors being more likely and slower read and write speeds.
I haven't kept up with that, I'm still using Samsung 470, 830 and Crucial M4 SSDs, which are rock f&^king solid, knock on wood.
But when they were released, with their much lower price tag, their TLC chips (with a huge SLC buffer to make it seem faster) seemed a bit suspicious - basically cheaper MLC, and that's not a good thing in this case.
I see the iPhone 7 as a competitor to the Galaxy S7 (quite a nice phone by the way). The Note range has always been more of a "phablet" than Samsung's flagship line.
It is, however, surprising that they didn't get it right.
Li-ion batteries are seemingly trickier than we consumers assume. Apple had a bit of bad press with the iPhone 4 when batteries starting exploding as well. I thought the industry would have worked it out since then, but according to many of the other comments in this (and other related) threads, Li-ion batteries are still an area of considerable research.
> The Note range has always been more of a "phablet" than Samsung's flagship line.
It's been the power-user line, the most full-featured variant, often more expensive than the Galaxy proper. "Flagship" is a loose term - they probably marketed the Galaxy proper more heavily, but the Note was their top-of-the-range phone, at least for a certain demographic.
There is no scenario under which the failure of one product, particularly the Note (far less popular than the Galaxy), ends the massive conglomerate known as Samsung. It's ~13% of South Korea's GDP and is very diverse. Samsung is so large and diverse it could end their entire lineup of smart phones and would still continue on as a successful technology company.
I don't have a link to a story to support this, but I heard they make more money off the sell of parts (screen panels, memory, etc) to Apple for iPhones than they do selling their own phones. Not sure if this is still true, but I do know it was true at one point.
Right, but it's pretty significant that it was Samsung who produced the exploding phones, while it was a criminal who tampered with perfectly good Tylenol pills. I'm sure that Samsung would take less of a hit if there were an individual who was attached small explosives to Galaxy Note devices.
They still haven't actually started a recall of the 'fixed'versions of the device though. I know people who bought them from carriers can get refunds/replacements but some buyers on Samsung's own web store have already been waiting weeks to arrange replacement or refunds of the v1 devices.
Manufacturing defects happen. Design defects happen. Even criminal activities by employees happen, but it's up to the leadership and the culture of the company to get on top of these issues and steer the ship back on course.
Overall Samsung has a decent reputation at competently engineering phones and batteries. But the way they've handled their responsibility for this issue is inexcusable. Ceasing manufacturing is about managing their own costs. What are they doing to actually help their customers?
That's not what the Verge article says. Verizon is taking back devices that they have sold, as are other carriers, but Samsung has not issued a recall of the replacement Note 7 devices.
Offering refunds to customers isn't the same as issuing a formal recall of all devices. They're doing the absolute minimum they can possibly get away with and trying to sweep the 'fixed' replacement Note 7 situation under the carpet.
At best they might be trying to put the replacement Note 7 non-recall recall under the umbrella of the original Note 7 recall, in order to avoid the embarrassment of issuing two formal recalls. But that's pure bullshit.
It's still pretty half-arsed. As I suspected, they're sweeping the recall of the replacement devices under the same recall notice. It'll be interesting to see if the CPSC accepts that.
My guess is that it's some other manufacturing defect and they were just in such a hurry to say "Yay we fixed it!" that they completely overlooked it before they shipped the replacement devices.
While the stories are all over the media, the truth is that there are less than 100 failures out of something like 3 million devices. I don't know about you guys, but if a bug only appears in my code in 0.003% of the time, I know I have a really hard time finding it.
Why do batteries need to be unique for each model? Some laptop lines (e.g. Lenovo) share removable batteries among models with similar power needs. Same used to be true of phones which had removable batteries from the same phone vendor.
That was before flagship phones needed to become thinner and bigger every few months. Can't have commonality of parts if your six months old battery is thicker than the whole new phone.
(There's still plenty of phones with replaceable, more-or-less standardized batteries available… but it's $50-200 phones that nobody wants to buy because they're not sexy enough. Even though they've been fast enough for years…)
Because everybody wants to be special. Size, weight, optimalization, screen edge corner angle, etc. It is a senseless, unsustainable development practice that creates much waste each year. Nobody seems to look at the future, everybody just wants to win in the here and now.
4 degrees later, we are all gone. The batteries remain, for a while. In 2135 CE, the last Samsung battery too will catch fire, starting an unstoppable wildfire that will consume much of Eurasia, along with whoever survived the previous social collapse. Then, only ashes will remain.
I am the only one who thinks this is an extraordinary step? Does this mean that they've identified the problem and believe that it's beyond repair? Or do they think that the Note 7 name has been so tarnished now that they just want to kill it?
It's especially surprising because most people who have the phone seem to love it, aside from, y'know, the risk of spontaneous combustion.
I think it's because of the brand damage. When you sell millions of phones, some tiny number will always have problems. Every single time that happens, the media will jump on it for yet-another-Samsung-Note-problem story.
At this point, they are probably mostly worried that the damage will spread to other Samsung properties. Some news stories are already trying to connect appliance failures.
Brand damage? 13-year-old kids are getting burned by these phones. Airplanes have been evacuated due to these phones. This is not a media overreaction.
Even if Samsung were to get their failure rates in line with Apple, Motorola, LG, and other manufacturers, a Samsung failure will still generate more coverage than any other brand. That's why there's no point in trying to salvage the Note 7.
> a Samsung failure will still generate more coverage than any other brand
Hello, Tim Cook on line 1. He'd like to quibble with your generalization.
What I find interesting about those earlier reports is the lack of follow-up. We know that the Note 7 explosions are happening "out of the box"; iPhone failures of this nature have often been attributed to cheap 3rd party chargers, but I can't find any information about the iPhones that led to evacuated flights.
Anyway, we're going to have to agree to disagree. There have been dozens of documented exploding Note 7 devices, which as best as I can determine is unprecedented. Any phone manufacturer would be under heavy fire.
For sure the current Note 7's are defective and failing in extraordinary numbers. I'm saying that even if Samsung were able to fix the flaw to get the failure rate down to normal levels or even better than average, future Note 7 failures will still garner more press coverage because of the high initial failure rate. The Note 7 brand is damaged beyond repair.
Probably the second. After even replacement devices are having issues, the brand damage can not continue further. They'll come out in 3 months with a "Note 8" and a new chance...
Wouldn't want to be working in that division right now. I'm assuming they'll try to sprint asap to a follow-up or a replacement. The longer they wait, the more they lose to other vendors I am assuming. And the bad publicity must be causing quite a headache as well.
Nevertheless, their other phones have been good (and I'm assuming that apart from catching fire this one was as well, though catching fire is a pretty big downside).
Sprint to a replacement? To basically do the same mistake twice (or thrice if you will)?
My bet is that they'll retreat and introduce the basic concept in/as another brand next year.
They did rush - they launched Note 7 a year ahead of its time (last year we had Note 5) when they were only supposed to release Note 6. That takes, dare I say, courage. (just a joke, they just skipped the number 6 to put it in line with the Galaxy S generation).
Pretty sure that one was to avoid a Windows Nein. (They are still striving for a Windows?Nein! situation given the FUBAR Anniversary Edition, albeit "by any other name")
I know - I was trying to use sarcasm to point how how marketing names don't really mean much in terms of product development and doesn't indicate anything here was rushed out the door.
The question is, "What replaces the absence of Galaxy Note 7 for another year or so (until the next version comes out)?" Note 5? A re-branded Note 7 with a slightly different look and hardware? Would Samsung junk the Note name and come up with some other name to bury this? My guess is that the Note name would go away completely or be superseded by a different name (with a prefix or suffix). That name now deserves to be erased and forgotten as quickly as possible.
I'm not surprised since I've seen the quality of Samsung going downhill for years. Even such things as the stupid blotware Kies and Kies air instead of just allowing you to connect the phone like a USB thumbdrive. I've rambled on about Samsung phones in the comment sections of various sites for years.
The last Samsung phone I bought was an S5 I still have it I skipped the S4 before that it the S3 which was not bad except for the screen glass quality.
I was impressed by the S2 the glass is nearly indestructible even my elderly dad with his pocket full of change and car keys never scratched the screen.
A replacement S3 I managed to scratch about a week after getting it but before that my original S3 screen cracked from end to end suddenly. When I was at Starbucks the barista said "Hey mine did I that too!" her phone had the same exact crack pattern S shaped top right to lower left.
This overall quality problem at Samsung shouldn't be a surprise. But really any modern phone cramming so much into a small thing with an enormous amount of energy crammed into a battery something had to give maybe Apple is next?
If you could point me to a smartphone that had an enormous amount of energy crammed in to the battery I'd be delighted. Would buy on of those today for sure.
Meh, my experience was the opposite - S2 died quickly, S3 was slow and with bloated software, Note 4 was and still is great. But anecdotes about one or two people's experience don't prove anything.
As a current Note 7 user, this is news bums me out. Not because the error rate of the manufactured phones may exceed safety requirements, but its the only device (tool) that has met my needs in a long time. Digital ink functionality is something I searched for since, those early Palm (PDA) days. The Surface Pro was a great answer to that as a laptop replacement. It never crossed my mind to get a Note until now.
I always shied away from the Samsung line of Android devices (except for the Galaxy Nexus), due to heavy handed re-skin of the UI. I have owned almost all of the Nexus phones, except for the Nexus 4. Each of the Google-blessed devices had compromises either battery, screen, camera (always), or MVP like design. The Google Pixel announcement pushed me over the edge to try a new product line. The Pixel looks just fine and is probably a good performer, but something about it feels very Gen 1. My wife has had the Note 7 since launch, and she claims its her favorite phone to date. Note 7 it was, TMobile had them in stock after the first recall.
To be honest, I have made a few changes to the Note 7 experience. After an hour or so of tweaking with the settings and installing a new launcher, I was holding a power-user Android device. It was just the right amount of stock Android and Samsung enhanced feature-set with strong hardware.
In the last week, the Note has quickly replaced the Surface Pro in more "mobile" scenarios. For example, client meetings, coffee chats, and jotting down notes in a quick huddles. I am an avid note taker, I love having the ability to archive all my notes to the cloud. OneNote does a great job of converting my notes to text, allows for searchability.
There is not a clear heir to the phablet throne. I have been keeping my eye on the Huawei Mate 9, Pixel XL, and a LG V20. They all have compromises and don't match the swiss-army knife approach of the Note 7. I love the idea of a master device with the ability for digital ink (S Pen) that also replaces media-consumption focused tablets (large sceen).
Hopefully current Note 7 users and future ones are vocal with Samsung to keep the Note series alive. It might raise awareness to other manufacturers to create similar devices. The majority of negative sentiment is coming from non-users (not to dismiss the real threat of injury). Which holds less water than positive encouragement from the users who planned to purchase or did purchase the Note. By positive encouragement, I mean asking for Samsung to fix the issue and we will be here waiting (hopefully its a fast turnaround).
I can't see myself parting with this tool. I am sure some of you here will understand when a device comes around that meets and exceeds all your niche needs, its pretty awesome! I would hate for it to disappear.
After owning the Note 7 every other phone in comparison seems the same: just a screen to show apps on and make calls. The s-pen is what sets this thing apart from the rest, and as a developer has helped me sharing ideas and solving problems. Would hate to give it up.
I wish Apple would make a phone with an integrated stylus.
Note 4 user here. Not sure what to do when this one dies. The pen is a great feature that hugely expands the uses of the device. I hope Samsung doesn't feel the need to stop producing phones with a pen.
For those of us wanting a phablet, what are the options right now?
Pixel is, IMHO, too expensive. The Note was top-end too, but at least had Wireless charging, which I like. Now it's gone. I don't 'do' iOS.
What's left? Most of the other phablets have got smaller, the Moto Z looks quite good (no QI, but otherwise great). People rave about the OnePlus 3 but the screen is low-res compared to many. I have found a device called "LeMax 2" by "Le Eco" which is dirt cheap by comparison, 5.7" QHD, snapdragon 820-based... Has anyone tried one?
The LG Stylo 2 Plus (at least the T-Mobile and MetroPCS variants) is a pretty good bet. It's not high-end, but you get a phablet-sized screen (720p), a stylus, about 2900 mAh of replaceable battery, and a decent if dumbed-down camera, with 2 GB RAM and 8 GB internal storage, and a MicroSD slot.
I'd love to see a V20 with a stylus, but I don't see that happening.
It's not clear that's ever getting a UK release, though import is a possibility. Also I'm not sold on the second screen - it adds to an already large phone.
Guess I'm glad I gave up and bought the S7 Edge instead. At least it still has a MicroSD slot, which was my biggest reason for sticking to the Note line.
Perhaps they feel the Note 7 name has been completely burnt (sorry!) in the public's eye and any attempt to salvage it at this point would cost them more than they could ever hope to recoup from further sales.
The only other thing I can think of is they've identified an issue with the phone itself that's causing this and either they or, more likely in my opinion, their insurance providers aren't willing to take the risk putting any more into the wild.
Couldn't it be the charging circuit? Or some fault in the power circuits that draws too much current too quickly? ie it might be something that is easy to replace like the battery, but something that requires a fundamental redesign of the electronics.
My presumption is that circuits designed to limit charge rates and voltage to the battery are built into the "battery pack" thus replacing this would be all that is required.
Yes, I find it strange too. Why can't they simply replace the battery with some other model? Even if it's internal, replacing it would cost way less than writing off the entire line.
They could probably drop in a replacement with what, half the capacity? But that impacts the whole design of the 'phone. There's a huge difference between a phone that lasts one day and a phone that lasts half a day. So they'd be looking to lower the screen brightness, maybe find a less power-hungry processor and/or LTE chip,.... by the time you've finished accomodating that kind of change it's a new model anyway.
3500 mAh doesn't strike as something astonishing. There are Chinese phones with >5000 mAh battery for sale (though I would not dare to vouch for their safety), even Galaxy S7 have 3000 mAh battery.
Surely not. I have 4000 mAh Chinese phone and it works 2 full days with normal (browsing, GPS, pdf reading) use. I don't doubt it's not "metric" 4000 mAh, but surely more than 1000 mAh, maybe 2000-3000 mAh.
I really wish they would. They are the ones that listened to people who were sick of how tiny the iphone and all of its clones were and went deep on a big phone. I still have a Note 3 and have little problem with it. I had no interest in the 7 because of the curved edges which I think is a stupid thing to do with phone screens. I will probably get a Pixel at some point and switch over to fi, but if Samsung does something interesting I will consider it.
I pretty much never charge my S4 these days. I have an external battery charger at home, a charger at work, and 3 batteries. It takes about 30 seconds to swap in a new one and then my phone is at full power instantly.
Maybe next time they'll offer replaceable batteries, which would have made this situation much less painful and is generally a plus for consumers anyway...
To make the battery replaceable while still providing the same amount of energy would require a thicker case around the battery, thicker contacts, and a discrete accessible compartment in the phone. All of this adds up to a much bigger phone. The days of replaceable batteries are over.
The chase for the thinnest device possible is plain stupid, the current devices with a replaceable battery are already thin enough to fit in a pocket, why go even further if it's such an inconvenience? For me, not having a replaceable battery is a very good reason to avoid buying such a device.
This race to the thinnest in mobile computing is going way too far for some years now, which sacrifices many things with no real gain: useful ports getting replaced by clunky adapters, modular components are replaced with glue, heat dissipation getting more challenging and finally loosing space for putting in batteries. You even regularly see oddities such as camera lenses sticking out of the back of a phone, leaving them unprotected, people putting their phone into cases because this thin things terribly fit your hand during usage and finally people carrying around external batteries all the time because the device obviously carries too little of them.
Additionally, pushing the device to the thinnest possible by not protecting the battery well enough was AFAIK the root cause of the problem at hand.
I completely agree. Is there any practical reason for this or is it just the best way these companies have come up with to try to convince people to buy a new phone every 18 months?
> To make the battery replaceable while still providing the same amount of energy would require a thicker case around the battery, thicker contacts, and a discrete accessible compartment in the phone.
The LG V20 just launched with a replacable battery. The phone is 0.3mm thinner than the Note 7, and its battery has 3200 mAh vs. 3500 mAh for the Note 7 battery.
And do you think it would still provide a tangible disadvantage to the user apart from maybe a style statement? The only relevant change I feel would be that it might get easier to keep in your hand.
I'm not speaking to matters of style. These are matters of convenience. If one wants to carry a device around all day, one wants it to be light and to actually work all day.
Even if they can figure out the problem and fix it to the point that they can offer refurbished Note 7s, seems risky. Unless they decide to actively brick existing Notes, there's the likelihood that some existing users will just hold on to their unfixed Note 7s. If these unfixed phones were to explode, it'd take days for authorities to confirm that they weren't the refurbished/fixed versions, and we'd have the same cycle of confusion and negative PR that Samsung is currently undergoing.
Ouch. So my bet is that Samsung is going to get serious about new battery tech and come out with a new set of devices in a couple of years touting their "revolutionary" new power system.
If we're lucky it will be ultra-capacitors that charge in seconds rather than hours. Unfortunately that tech still has 5x less capacity than lithiums.
The subject says it all, but am I the only one who isn't a subscriber of the Wall Street Journal? Is there no free source on the Internet for this same piece of news?
I'm not saying everything should be free. I build paid-for services on the web myself. But how is “To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In” useful on the Hacker News?
Plus, if you give in and subscribe to the WSJ they go out of their way to make it difficult to unsubscribe, requiring users to call in by phone and be subjected to a sales pitch just to cancel the recurring charges. It's a very scummy retention tactic.
It's so common, it's ridiculous. The NYT has the same policy, and you have to call in on certain days of the week at certain times. They even published an opinion piece decrying the practice while participating in it.
The call centre employees will even discount your subscription to try to keep you. Not at all cool.
I finally started letting Amex sort this out. I'll attempt to call to cancel a service (during my local business hours), follow up with a short letter if the call is unsuccessful.
After that, any new charges that appear result in a call to the Amex Fraud Dept. Sadly there have been a couple services I had to do this with.
I had the same thing with the Times (Murdoch-owned) in the UK. I remember that I got through on the phone but they said that it wouldn't be possible to cancel my account without charging the next two (monthly) billing cycles.
I cancelled my card and somehow they managed to cancel the account once payment didn't go through.
Only fucking subscribed because of one article we were in, ended up paying for almost a year of none-usage.
Fyi: I subscribed briefly through their iOS app. The Apple app store allows you to easily manage subscriptions made through any app from the store, which made it much easier to cancel.
I had a subscription to sugarsync for a few months longer than I needed due to their "cancellation dept" only being open a few hours a day in some far off timezone. Hateful.
Because sometimes they break stories and have exclusive content and in depth info that others won't have immediately if ever. For example they were ahead of everyone with the Theranos news.
I think the idea of putting links on HN is its better to know about it asap, rather than possibly using a slower or less comprehensive source.
> Because sometimes they break stories and have exclusive content and in depth info that others won't have immediately if ever
This story has been in Reddit home page for last 14 hours pointing to the original source on the official Samsung website[1]. This content is neither exclusive nor breaking.
That's a good point, and I applaud the Wall Street Journal for their journalistic efforts. I'm thinking we should get a WSJ subscription in our company.
I'm not so sure if Hacker News should be an outlet for breaking news. The HN platform is not very well suited for real-time news in general.
Myself, I use Hacker news for "daily important news" much less than breaking news.
I don't like getting into word definition argument but doesn't that information about Samsung fall under the daily important news rather than the breaking news ?
Yes, it does. That's why I'd like to see a link to a free source (that doesn't require one to pull ostentibly illegal tricks to read the contents) rather than an advertisement.
>I think the idea of putting links on HN is its better to know about it asap, rather than possibly using a slower or less comprehensive source.
I agree, but in light of the comments above about their horrific and unethical subscription-cancellation policies and practices, I think there should be a clear warning attached to every link from a news source like this, highlighting exactly what you're getting into if you choose to subscribe in order to read the article.
I hope he does try to sue for a link to google which has a link to his own site which behaves in a certain way based on the if HTTP_REFERER header says it was from google. He could stop the behavior at any time by changing his own code. It would set a good public precedent to help curtail such buffoonery moving forward.
The link at the top of the google result of the headline you should search. (But if you enjoy the WSJ, consider picking up a subscription or a paper from time to time.) :)
Rather than a down-vote, I'd be interested in some suggestions about what I'm doing wrong.
1. Click "web" (or alternately, Google the title of the article, verbatim from the article itself)
2. Click the appropriate link from Google, so that my referrer will be google.com.
When I do that, I still get the pay-walled article. I've tried deleting my wsj cookies and doing the same. I've tried using another computer on another network, with the same result.
That raises two questions for me: What am I doing wrong? Why do I get dinged without explanation for suggesting a second approach that does work for me?
Because due to a black hat trick called cloaking [1], Google penalizes pages that show different content to users and crawlers. So web sites serve a free version of their content to Google.
Google discourages websites from appearing in search but requiring registration to view. If the website detects that the user came from a Google search, they don't throw up the paywall.
WSJ's reporters and servers are funded by money, not nice words on HN. I don't understand everyone's obsession with bypassing paywalls on news links. I occasionally buy paper copies of newspapers.
Delete your *.wsj.com cookies, use a referrer control addon and set it to google.com for wsj.com and enjoy clicking HN links and not see the content block.
I don't love it, but I don't have a problem with it, mostly because I have no idea what other route they could take.
Ad-supported is something Buzzfeed can make viable, but it means tailoring both the substance and the form of their content to optimize for that. Doesn't work for WaPo.
I'm fine with the WSJ doing this. Businesses are free to monetize their content as they see fit.
I don't like that a link to a WSJ paygate page gets this amount of votes on Hacker News, when there are numerous free links available for the same information.
If anything, I'm saying "don't vote for paygate links" to whoever clicked to upvote on the OP link.
They have to be very careful -- Google's guidelines are very strict about content that they index. If you display different content to a user than the content that Google has indexed, that will cause Google to drop the page from their index, and may affect the overall quality rating for your site in Google's index.
Nobody really wants to cross them here; if you want your content indexed and displayed in search results, you have to show the full content to users inbound from search result pages.
> SEOUL — Samsung Electronics is terminating production of its troubled Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, according to a person familiar with the decision, in a major and embarrassing about-face for the South Korean electronics giant.
> In a statement filed with the country’s stock exchange late Tuesday, Samsung said it had made a “final decision” to stop production. That means the company will no longer produce or market the smartphone, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Samsung did not publicly disclose further information about the decision.
Paywalls only have to allow you visit their site 3 times a day for free if you come from google [0]. It might not work because you have visited more then 3 articles already today. Deleting your cookies or entering the private mode of your browser should do the trick, though.
It's a by-product of the broken paywall model. Sites want to protect their content, but they still want traffic to their site. Checking that the referrer is a search engine is a weird middle-way workaround.
Most paywalls check the request referral and let it through when it comes from the big search engines. This ensures they will remain listed and hence relevant.
Click on 'web' link below the title above, this will take you to a google search for the story, which generally allows you to read the full story (for SEO purposes)
They "upgraded" their paywall game. Also, the first topic with the most votes is ALWAYS a link to another article with the same information or a TLDR; for those who can't access the paywalled article.
Please just ban the wsj domain, so people would search for an alternative article immediatly. This is, after all, what wsj seems to want :)
I second the banning of paywalled domains; trying to maintain hacks and workarounds for each and every popular third-party just doesn't seem worth it in the long-run. HN should be for open discussion on content that is freely available to all rather than locked down.
Yet by not banning WSJ, maybe HN is making people annoyed at WSJ, damaging their brand, driving traffic to competitors, and teaching people to just rely on peer provided TLDRs instead of journalists, all of which might hurt WSJ more than just banning them... I guess we'll never know :)
I quite fancy joining lobste.rs as I've been reading it anon for a while now, so an invite would be gratefully received. my email is <my-hn-name>@<my-hn-name>.com
>I don't know what to suggest other than looking for alternatives to HN.
If you refuse to read the posted article, then you should choose not to participate in threads discussing it, rather than wasting valuable thread-space with off-topic complaints about the site's business model.
Given that other people here seem to be capable of discussing the actual subject at hand, the posting of paywalled articles obviously isn't wasted on the community at large. However, every irrelevant tangent about how terrible paywalls are is a waste of time.
Given that other people in this thread seem to be capable of disucssing the paywall, complaints about it obviously aren't wasted on the community at large.
The complaints are wasted, because the staff has made it clear that they aren't going to change the policy to banning all paywalled content, and complaining that they should is off topic.
This thread is about Samsung discontinuing the Galaxy Note 7 Smartphone, it's not about the paywall, or whether Hacker News should allow paywalls.
This community is about prioritizing signal over noise and these tangents are always, always mere noise.
It's not about refusing to read an article, it's about it being difficult, if not impossible, to read it. If sites don't want the general public to read their content, we should respect that; the content probably isn't suitable for a free, open discussion site like HN.
Some people refuse to read any paywalled articles or attempt to work around them, and then insist that Hacker News should cater to them by not allowing those articles to be posted to begin with.
And yet discussion of those articles exists despite their objections, so obviously the problem isn't that the articles aren't accessible, or can't generate discussion, but that people are offended at the existence of paywalls and want their ideals to take priority over what can and can't be discussed here.
I would honestly expect the supply to outstrip the demand quite quickly ... however it looks like ebay prices are still pretty respectable.
At least for me, the fire risk would make me entertain the other less flammable options in the vast market of android devices - regardless of a pricing point. The thought that it could combust into flames unsupervised while I'm say, in the shower is enough to make me really not want it.
I know the chances are small but reputation goes a long way especially if that reputation is "may explode".
I was of the understanding that everyone's expectations re the iPhone 7 were already pretty low. They made sure that the lack of an audio plug was leaked well before the official announcement...
I'm wondering how this news will affect sales of Googles new phones.
And finally the Samsung stock price reflects the news. It was pretty fascinating to watch it hit its all-time high on 10/7. From what I read it seems that a relatively small percentage of their revenue is impacted by this, so investors aren't that rattled.
I'm not one to try and time the market, but if I were to gamble, this might be a fun one to try to get in on now.
To be fair, Samsung sells a hell of a lot more than smartphones. They're a giant conglomerate that sells everything under the sun, and manufactures for half the electronics industry.
I guess I just bought the right yet boring phone .. the iPhone 7.
The Note 7 looked crazy innovative besides full waterproofing, iris scanning..it be turned into a deadly weapon that could be used for mass destruction :-/
On a side note such a phone that floating around could be used by terrorists on planes. How will airlines handle this?
Airlines are already specifically the Note 7, I saw a notice at the security check in Amsterdam (Schiphol) about it. I wouldn't be surprised if a patch goes out soon for those color-coding x-ray scanners, that automatically detects a Note 7.
Having said that, this is a pretty small incendiary that we are talking about, and aircraft are several layers thick everywhere that a passenger can access. How would a terrorist actually use this to put a hole in a plane?
LOLolol I just got off a Qatar Airways flight, where they made an announcement asking any passengers with a Note 7 to hand it over. But then when disembarking in DXB (Dubai), I noticed a floor to ceiling ad for the Note 7. Epic fail.
The recall notice only seems to apply to people who bought the phone in America. If you change the "us" in the url of the official notice to something else, like "ca", you get a 404. http://www.samsung.com/us/note7recall/
Is this recall only available in the US? Is the rest of the world basically screwed, unless their own governments put some pressure on Samsung?
From the FAQ:
> 4. I participated in the U.S. Note7 Exchange Program. Is my replacement Galaxy Note7 affected?
> Yes. This applies to all Galaxy Note7 phones _in the U.S._ (emphasis mine)
I'm not sure what you think that proves. A US URL works for the US and talks about the US? Surprising? Other countries are doing recalls too, and have pages talking about it.
I see that you found the same outdated notice as me, when I googled: it refers to an exchange program, not a recall. Check out this foot-in-mouth quote:
> Canadian Note7 Software Update showcases Note7 device is safe for use.
At this point, I think that it is most likely that there will eventually be a global recall (how could there not be? that would be madness) but they just haven't gotten around to updating all of the other countries. Recalls are complex, I guess. But they should at least shut down the exchange program ASAP, that's just a waste of time at this point.
They have spent a huge amount of money on marketing this phone. I wrote a week or so back it could be the end of Samsung and people told me I was an idiot - they make so many other things, their spread is so broad, they can just produce the next phone and move on.
This has done untold damage to their brand in the eyes of the average consumer and has wasted so much money, I think they are going to need to get smart, and quickly.
First, all those sales are now refunded. That is going to hurt cashflow and cause ripples across the entire business. Sure, it's not going to hurt some of their industrial projects but hampered cash flow is like having a respiratory disease: most people who get pneumonia don't die of the pneumonia, but organs shutting down because of the lack of oxygen they get as a result of the pneumonia.
Secondly, a lot of marketing dollars are now wasted, gone. They did a global campaign around the Olympics for this phone - it doesn't get much bigger. Just be glad that they didn't launch this in early February otherwise they would have taken every Super Bowl slot available. Those who do remember their advertising around this spend will remember it as them talking about a phone that scared airlines into thinking it might take down an aircraft.
Finally, many consumers won't buy Samsung phones again as a minimum when they're first released, maybe never as a worst case scenario. This has done long-term damage, we can't deny it.
I know a lot of people are fans of Samsung, and it's true they are a great company, but objectively this has got to be damaging to them.