> what if Apple had indeed sabotaged the Note 7 production line? Here's a better hypothesis: building a smartphone that is very thin yet has decent battery lif

> what if Apple had indeed sabotaged the Note 7 production line? Here's a better hypothesis: building a smartphone that is very thin yet has decent battery life and charges quickly is really hard. It requires tricky engineering that is possible to screw up and Samsung did in fact screw it up. Although the first explanation that came to mind was "the batteries were bad" that was not the correct explanation. The correct explanation is that the design was bad. Maybe this case is too small and inflexible to allow for heat expansion, maybe some contacts are too close together, maybe some material that wasn't supposed to be conductive is (sometimes) conducting a charge. Making an iPhone-competitive phone is hard. Making a million of them to ship all at once means even a one-in-ten-thousand risk of catastrophic failure is way too high, so at the same time as you're pushing the limits of what engineering is capable of you have to build in a very large safety margin or have an extremely good QA process or both. When you think about it, the amazing thing isn't that the Note 7 design failed, the amazing thing is that this doesn't happen more often, either to Samsung or to other manufactures.