5 ms·

>It’s gonna happen. Yeah, and when it does, the manufacturer of that lithium bomb should pay for it. And not just to compensate the victim, but to make the co

>It’s gonna happen. Yeah, and when it does, the manufacturer of that lithium bomb should pay for it. And not just to compensate the victim, but to make the cost of negligent manufacture higher than the savings it brings to the company in engineering, QA, and production. Numbers are not an excuse. There is over a billion cars in the world, most filled with highly flammable gasoline that actually burns inside them. Yet none are spontaneously exploding. Self-immolating headphones - small speakers that you put on your head, mind you - are an egregious abuse of safety, public trust, and all reason. By an ostensibly "luxury" brand, no less. There is no "but" about it. If they can't make safe headphones, they should not make headphones period. OP, please report them to CPSC here: https://www.saferproducts.gov/IncidentReporting https://www.saferproducts.gov/IncidentReporting

fastball 5y ago
You cannot be certain that this was entirely "spontaneous". Yes, the OP prefaced with a number of common reasons this might happen that do not apply in his case, but that does not mean the root cause is faulty manufacture. Hell, it's possible that a high-energy particle from space hit the battery in his headphones in just the right spot and that's why it exploded. Would you hold Bose responsible in that case?
- valvar 5y ago
  Because they didn't design it around that possibility. If the battery blows up, regardless of cause, it should do so in a controlled manner which minimizes the harm caused to the wearer.
  - jen729w 5y ago
    Okay cool and now the headphones weigh a kilo because of shielding and nobody buys them.
    - valvar 5y ago
      Maybe? Your alternative seems to be to let a few people die every now and then, so that some companies can get better margins.
      - tempestn 5y ago
        Nobody did die though, nor is it very likely they would. And this is one pair out of however many million they've sold. I'm not arguing there shouldn't be compensation in this instance, nor an investigation into why it happened. But hypothetically if it was some one in a million space particle (which is obviously unlikely), I think it's pretty ludicrous to expect Bose to design for that eventuality.
        romwell 5y ago
        > I think it's pretty ludicrous to expect Bose to design for that eventuality. That decision is, indeed, up to Bose. But should they choose to continue making a headphones that have a 1-in-N-million chance of exploding, this should be clearly indicated on every pair they sell. So that their competitors who choose to invest in safety would be able to reap the fruit if their labor in the free market.
        Bud 5y ago
        How many times are you going to say "exploding" to describe something that didn't explode? You're clearly cognizant of the fact you are lying, so why keep doing it? Why not just describe what happened accurately? Is it a concern that you can't make your point if you relate to the facts in a more accurate fashion, without the repeated hyperbole?
        romwell 5y ago
        >How many times are you going to say "exploding" I am going to say it every time I talk about Bose QuietComfort 35 II headphones, which violently exploded and left their user with chemical burns while they were wearing them and using normally. This is an accurate description. Allow me to refer you to Merriam-Webster dictionary for the meaning of the word "explode", which you have an issue with: >Definition of explode >1: to burst forth with sudden violence or noise from internal energy: such as >a): to undergo a rapid chemical or nuclear reaction with the production of noise, heat, and violent expansion of gases Bose QC 35 II headphones most certainly did undergo a rapid chemical reaction with the production of heat and violent expansion of gases. The violent expansion is what left the OP with chemical burns. You are welcome. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/explode https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/explode
  - mrmattyboy 5y ago
    Replying to this and jen729's comment, which I can't reply to for some reason. I'm not entirely sure why this got downvoted (bit of a personal gripe with YC (anonymous down voting/spamming without a direct comment).. buuuut This idea is only 'silly' if you think of it as a large amount of lead lining. In this day-in-age, I'm sure the idea of a material/substance around it that stops combustion when something like this happens is surely not out of reach.. I'm as far away from a chemical engineer as you can get, but, if it requires oxygen to burn, maybe some incredibly strong substance around it to contain the chemicals if the battery expands. Or some to absorb oxygen around it. I dunno, maybe I'm incredibly naive, but it feels like something that, if a portion of the companies that manufacturer/use the batteries put effort into something, it's something that could be made _more_ safe in some way?
    - romwell 5y ago
      >I'm not entirely sure why this got downvoted Because we are on HackerNews, where the consequences of their own actions only exist for individuals and not the corporations they hope to be CEOs of one day. I didn't realize that I'd need to argue, in 2021, that selling people dangerous products as safe is, in principle, wrong, but here we are. To people asking "What did the OP expect", the answer is: whatever the instruction manual said on Page 1. And it surely didn't say: "WARNING: MAY KILL YOU DURING NORMAL OPERATION". Once it does, we can have a discussion about everything else.
      - Linosaurus 5y ago
        > whatever the instruction manual said on Page 1. And it surely didn't say: "WARNING: MAY KILL YOU DURING NORMAL OPERATION". Tbh it probably wouldn't take much to get that added to the boilerplate warnings of every battery product sold, just in case.
        romwell 5y ago
        The point is, the manufacturers of safe products will have a selling point by being able to differentiated themselves. Heck, wired headphone makers will get a boost from that.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  I mean probably. In 1,000,000 such cases of devices causing injury in general, how many are caused by space particles and how many are caused by human fallibility? Whether it's a design issue, qa failure, supply chain issue with unexpected material in the device, or deliberate malice, the company is responsible for the product it sells, and the customer has a reasonable expectation that it won't explode. The cosmic particle idea isn't completely outlandish, but it's impossible to prove, and it's statistically far more likely that it was a human failure. Given the rarity of spontaneously exploding batteries, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the particles are responsible for less than 1 in a million incidents, so yeah, the company should be liable. That's the cost of business, and on a humanistic note, making things better for the guy would just be the good thing to do.
- williamscales 5y ago
  yes? products should be designed so that they do not kill anyone?
  - nine_k 5y ago
    You will not be able to produce a hammer (can by mistake crush a skull), or a ball pen (can pierce the chest and reach the heart in a fall), or a bottle of water (one can choke on the water). Nothing is perfectly safe. People should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale.
    - romwell 5y ago
      >Nothing is perfectly safe. People should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale. Including the business of selling self-exploding headphones. Corporations should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale where they can pull off shit like that off without consequence. Can't make safe headphones? Leave it to someone who can. Free market or something. (In case you're not getting it, it's not about living in fairy tales, it's about increasing the cost of failure to corporations to a high enough point that they will put some money into safety instead of pocketing it.)
      - fastball 5y ago
        How exactly would you develop headphones that are hardened against high energy particles from space? NASA has a hard time doing this for their vehicles that are intended to be in deep space.
        nine_k 5y ago
        A better design could be such that remains safe (even if functionally degraded) when hit with a burst of cosmic rays. Whether it can be done within the constraints of mass, volume, and expense that keep the headphones competitive is another (hard) question.
    - ImprobableTruth 5y ago
- romwell 5y ago
  >You cannot be certain that this was entirely "spontaneous". Yes, and it's not my business to find out. It's the job of CPSC and investigators to find the reasons. Which is why I insisted the OP should file a report. And as for establishing certainty, I'm not a judge or a jury, whose job it is to do so. Which is why I suggested the OP should take it to court. >Hell, it's possible that a high-energy particle from space hit the battery in his headphones in just the right spot and that's why it exploded. Would you hold Bose responsible in that case? I can't hold Bose responsible, the courts and CPSC can. Since it's also possible that OP was, you know, correct in his assessment, this case should get their attention.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Responsibility should always rest with the responsible party, I. e. the one in the best position to have avoided this. It’s isn’t about guilt, but simply the redistribution of a harm that has already happened. Unless the device was mishandled in some unusual way, the manufacturer should bear this burden because they are/were in the best position to implement mechanisms to avoid the harm, from improved QA to a better design and, ultimately, to rhe informed decision not to sell the device.
rad_gruchalski 5y ago
> Yet none are spontaneously exploding. Not anymore.
colechristensen 5y ago
I had a family member have a car light on fire on the road and burn to a charred shell within a matter of minutes, it happens. Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. You should know so you can properly deal with problems. There is an annoying trend among people that expect everything to be perfectly safe. It seems to be a symptom of an overly sheltered existence.
- romwell 5y ago
  >There is an annoying trend among people that expect everything to be perfectly safe. It seems to be a symptom of an overly sheltered existence. Yeah, how overly sheltered to not expect your headphones to not catch on fire and kill you. It's a symptom of not believing when someone pisses in our eyes and tells us it's raining. Especially when it's happening on our own dime. >Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. Then lithium batteries should be banned from headphones. >You should know so you can properly deal with problems. Good point! And where would the customer learn about this? From HackerNews? Last time I checked, Bose devices didn't come with a self-combustion warning. And until they do, my point applies.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    A consumer would learn this by having interest in the world around them and how it works beyond being slapped in the face with every warning possible (I’m looking at you, literally everything in the world which is known in the state of California to cause cancer). We don’t need cushioned guard rails on literally everything. When was the last time you actually read a product manual? Many of them actually are full of warnings about how things fail. I have no idea about Bose headphones, I definitely threw away everything but the headphones immediately. No we should not ban everything that doesn’t have a zero percent fault rate. This weird angry response is a symptom of this sheltered fear which comes from not understanding that the world isn’t ever going to be perfect. You make really bad decisions when you’re in denial about the impossibility of safety perfection.
    - romwell 5y ago
onion2k 5y ago
There is over a billion cars in the world, most filled with highly flammable gasoline that actually burns inside them. Yet none are spontaneously exploding. They absolutely are. 170,000 a year in the US alone. Some are even due to known design faults. A few years ago Ford recalled almost a million pickups due to a fire risk, and then recalled half of them again because the first fix caused another fire risk. The probability of injury or death from a vehicle fire is probably much higher than the risk of injury from wireless headphones. https://www.consumernotice.org/personal-injury/vehicle-safety/highway-vehicle-fires/ https://www.consumernotice.org/personal-injury/vehicle-safet...
- romwell 5y ago
  Yeah, and GM just recalled effectively all EVs they ever made. What's your point? Mine was that Bose should do the same thing with their headphones, and they won't do it out of their own accord. Also consider that there are billions of porcelain dishes made in the world, and somehow, they don't self-explode. If headphones are different in that regard, they should be, at the very least, clearly labeled as such - which is not the case.
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    > GM just recalled effectively all EVs they ever made. What has this got to do with exploding ICE cars? > What's your point? I think GPs point was pretty clear. You made a completely unfounded claim, ICE cars don’t spontaneously explode, despite the fact that evidence shows they clearly do, and do so at a rate higher than headphones or EVs.
  - Bud 5y ago
    I think their point was that you were pretty sloppy with your facts.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    The point is that no matter how hard you try, electrical, mechanical or chemical failure will always be a risk. It's an inherent property of physical objects. It's impossibly to make them perfectly safe. Although, to be fair, given the number of objects compared to the number of failures, we're pretty close. Obviously manufacturers should attempt to minimize the risk but they'll never reduce it to zero. If you're concerned about exploding lithium ion or lithium polymer devices in your home the only recourse available to you is not to buy any. If you do that you should also be aware that corded devices also catch fire sometimes though. You should avoid those too. Maybe just avoid electrical systems entirely.
algo646464 5y ago
Don't manufacturers do that already? Take into account the probability of a costly failure, and increase the price to account for it. And compensate victims to a certain extent, but quietly. I suppose they would fight any publicity of such incidents, since that would have a huge impact on sales, I have read a few such stories, and usually they disappear from the news pretty soon, likely because the victim agreed to be quietly compensated. I could be wrong.
- romwell 5y ago
  >Don't manufacturers do that already? Yes they do, and this is why we have CPSC and lawsuits: to increase the cost of failure to the point where it's not a wise business decision to allow one to happen. Nothing is 100% fool-proof, but the difference between 99.9% safe and 99.99% safe is 10x decrease in incidents.
kybernetyk 5y ago
>Yet none are spontaneously exploding. Well, at lease EVs are spontaneously catching fire.
bartread 5y ago
> By an ostensibly "luxury" brand, no less. Bose aren't luxury: they're premium mediocre. They're expensive - overpriced in fact - but have a supremely competent marketing team who are probably responsible for mopping up a good portion of that premium. That doesn't make this incident any better or more excusable but it does go some way to explaining why it happened: the product is poor quality and cheaply engineered. You get what you pay for, and with Bose you are paying to be hoodwinked by flashy marketing and "brand equity".
- reitzensteinm 5y ago
  I wouldn't consider Bose for anything else, but the noise cancelling on this particular headset is very good. I'll probably swap to Sony next, but when I bought them there wasn't really a viable competitor.
  - ghusbands 5y ago
    From what little I know, Bose has patents on a number of noise-cancelling techniques, hence making it tricky for other manufacturers to match them in noise-cancelling. However, in the past five years, several other manufacturers have done pretty well (though I believe some cross-licence patents with Bose), and Sony and Apple do lead in some comparative reviews. It is a shame that Bose's lead in noise-cancelling isn't matched in the quality of their sound.
    - Filligree 5y ago
      The Sony WX-1000s, I guess? I'm quite impressed with them. Both the noise-cancelling and sound quality are better than the QC35s I used to use.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        Yes. I've tried them side-by-side (and a whole bunch of others) and the Sony came out as way better than the rest, which given my one-man boycott of Sony products after the rootkit debacle is a bit of a letdown. So I hope the boycott gods won't notice my lack of fortitude.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> the manufacturer of that lithium bomb Thing is, small lithium bombs do less damage than large ones. Now Bose makes a point of advertising the long battery-life of these devices; 20 hours, they say. Doesn't that mean that Bose is profiting from the long battery life, while failing to mention that their competitors sell cans with smaller ear-bombs in them?
Hnrobert42 5y ago
> make the cost of negligent manufacture What negligence?
- ghusbands 5y ago
  It's almost by definition negligent to create a product that burns the user under normal use. These sorts of incidents in the past have led to recalls, to bans on taking devices on airplanes and similar. It's no small thing.

fastball 5y ago

You cannot be certain that this was entirely "spontaneous". Yes, the OP prefaced with a number of common reasons this might happen that do not apply in his case, but that does not mean the root cause is faulty manufacture. Hell, it's possible that a high-energy particle from space hit the battery in his headphones in just the right spot and that's why it exploded. Would you hold Bose responsible in that case?

valvar 5y ago
Because they didn't design it around that possibility. If the battery blows up, regardless of cause, it should do so in a controlled manner which minimizes the harm caused to the wearer.
- jen729w 5y ago
  Okay cool and now the headphones weigh a kilo because of shielding and nobody buys them.
  - valvar 5y ago
    Maybe? Your alternative seems to be to let a few people die every now and then, so that some companies can get better margins.
    - tempestn 5y ago
      Nobody did die though, nor is it very likely they would. And this is one pair out of however many million they've sold. I'm not arguing there shouldn't be compensation in this instance, nor an investigation into why it happened. But hypothetically if it was some one in a million space particle (which is obviously unlikely), I think it's pretty ludicrous to expect Bose to design for that eventuality.
      - romwell 5y ago
        > I think it's pretty ludicrous to expect Bose to design for that eventuality. That decision is, indeed, up to Bose. But should they choose to continue making a headphones that have a 1-in-N-million chance of exploding, this should be clearly indicated on every pair they sell. So that their competitors who choose to invest in safety would be able to reap the fruit if their labor in the free market.
        Bud 5y ago
        How many times are you going to say "exploding" to describe something that didn't explode? You're clearly cognizant of the fact you are lying, so why keep doing it? Why not just describe what happened accurately? Is it a concern that you can't make your point if you relate to the facts in a more accurate fashion, without the repeated hyperbole?
        romwell 5y ago
        >How many times are you going to say "exploding" I am going to say it every time I talk about Bose QuietComfort 35 II headphones, which violently exploded and left their user with chemical burns while they were wearing them and using normally. This is an accurate description. Allow me to refer you to Merriam-Webster dictionary for the meaning of the word "explode", which you have an issue with: >Definition of explode >1: to burst forth with sudden violence or noise from internal energy: such as >a): to undergo a rapid chemical or nuclear reaction with the production of noise, heat, and violent expansion of gases Bose QC 35 II headphones most certainly did undergo a rapid chemical reaction with the production of heat and violent expansion of gases. The violent expansion is what left the OP with chemical burns. You are welcome. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/explode https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/explode
- mrmattyboy 5y ago
  Replying to this and jen729's comment, which I can't reply to for some reason. I'm not entirely sure why this got downvoted (bit of a personal gripe with YC (anonymous down voting/spamming without a direct comment).. buuuut This idea is only 'silly' if you think of it as a large amount of lead lining. In this day-in-age, I'm sure the idea of a material/substance around it that stops combustion when something like this happens is surely not out of reach.. I'm as far away from a chemical engineer as you can get, but, if it requires oxygen to burn, maybe some incredibly strong substance around it to contain the chemicals if the battery expands. Or some to absorb oxygen around it. I dunno, maybe I'm incredibly naive, but it feels like something that, if a portion of the companies that manufacturer/use the batteries put effort into something, it's something that could be made _more_ safe in some way?
  - romwell 5y ago
    >I'm not entirely sure why this got downvoted Because we are on HackerNews, where the consequences of their own actions only exist for individuals and not the corporations they hope to be CEOs of one day. I didn't realize that I'd need to argue, in 2021, that selling people dangerous products as safe is, in principle, wrong, but here we are. To people asking "What did the OP expect", the answer is: whatever the instruction manual said on Page 1. And it surely didn't say: "WARNING: MAY KILL YOU DURING NORMAL OPERATION". Once it does, we can have a discussion about everything else.
    - Linosaurus 5y ago
      > whatever the instruction manual said on Page 1. And it surely didn't say: "WARNING: MAY KILL YOU DURING NORMAL OPERATION". Tbh it probably wouldn't take much to get that added to the boilerplate warnings of every battery product sold, just in case.
      - romwell 5y ago
        The point is, the manufacturers of safe products will have a selling point by being able to differentiated themselves. Heck, wired headphone makers will get a boost from that.
robbedpeter 5y ago
I mean probably. In 1,000,000 such cases of devices causing injury in general, how many are caused by space particles and how many are caused by human fallibility? Whether it's a design issue, qa failure, supply chain issue with unexpected material in the device, or deliberate malice, the company is responsible for the product it sells, and the customer has a reasonable expectation that it won't explode. The cosmic particle idea isn't completely outlandish, but it's impossible to prove, and it's statistically far more likely that it was a human failure. Given the rarity of spontaneously exploding batteries, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the particles are responsible for less than 1 in a million incidents, so yeah, the company should be liable. That's the cost of business, and on a humanistic note, making things better for the guy would just be the good thing to do.
williamscales 5y ago
yes? products should be designed so that they do not kill anyone?
- nine_k 5y ago
  You will not be able to produce a hammer (can by mistake crush a skull), or a ball pen (can pierce the chest and reach the heart in a fall), or a bottle of water (one can choke on the water). Nothing is perfectly safe. People should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale.
  - romwell 5y ago
    >Nothing is perfectly safe. People should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale. Including the business of selling self-exploding headphones. Corporations should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale where they can pull off shit like that off without consequence. Can't make safe headphones? Leave it to someone who can. Free market or something. (In case you're not getting it, it's not about living in fairy tales, it's about increasing the cost of failure to corporations to a high enough point that they will put some money into safety instead of pocketing it.)
    - fastball 5y ago
      How exactly would you develop headphones that are hardened against high energy particles from space? NASA has a hard time doing this for their vehicles that are intended to be in deep space.
      - nine_k 5y ago
        A better design could be such that remains safe (even if functionally degraded) when hit with a burst of cosmic rays. Whether it can be done within the constraints of mass, volume, and expense that keep the headphones competitive is another (hard) question.
  - ImprobableTruth 5y ago
romwell 5y ago
>You cannot be certain that this was entirely "spontaneous". Yes, and it's not my business to find out. It's the job of CPSC and investigators to find the reasons. Which is why I insisted the OP should file a report. And as for establishing certainty, I'm not a judge or a jury, whose job it is to do so. Which is why I suggested the OP should take it to court. >Hell, it's possible that a high-energy particle from space hit the battery in his headphones in just the right spot and that's why it exploded. Would you hold Bose responsible in that case? I can't hold Bose responsible, the courts and CPSC can. Since it's also possible that OP was, you know, correct in his assessment, this case should get their attention.
KarlKemp 5y ago
Responsibility should always rest with the responsible party, I. e. the one in the best position to have avoided this. It’s isn’t about guilt, but simply the redistribution of a harm that has already happened. Unless the device was mishandled in some unusual way, the manufacturer should bear this burden because they are/were in the best position to implement mechanisms to avoid the harm, from improved QA to a better design and, ultimately, to rhe informed decision not to sell the device.

rad_gruchalski 5y ago

> Yet none are spontaneously exploding. Not anymore.

colechristensen 5y ago

I had a family member have a car light on fire on the road and burn to a charred shell within a matter of minutes, it happens. Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. You should know so you can properly deal with problems. There is an annoying trend among people that expect everything to be perfectly safe. It seems to be a symptom of an overly sheltered existence.

romwell 5y ago
>There is an annoying trend among people that expect everything to be perfectly safe. It seems to be a symptom of an overly sheltered existence. Yeah, how overly sheltered to not expect your headphones to not catch on fire and kill you. It's a symptom of not believing when someone pisses in our eyes and tells us it's raining. Especially when it's happening on our own dime. >Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. Then lithium batteries should be banned from headphones. >You should know so you can properly deal with problems. Good point! And where would the customer learn about this? From HackerNews? Last time I checked, Bose devices didn't come with a self-combustion warning. And until they do, my point applies.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  A consumer would learn this by having interest in the world around them and how it works beyond being slapped in the face with every warning possible (I’m looking at you, literally everything in the world which is known in the state of California to cause cancer). We don’t need cushioned guard rails on literally everything. When was the last time you actually read a product manual? Many of them actually are full of warnings about how things fail. I have no idea about Bose headphones, I definitely threw away everything but the headphones immediately. No we should not ban everything that doesn’t have a zero percent fault rate. This weird angry response is a symptom of this sheltered fear which comes from not understanding that the world isn’t ever going to be perfect. You make really bad decisions when you’re in denial about the impossibility of safety perfection.
  - romwell 5y ago

onion2k 5y ago

There is over a billion cars in the world, most filled with highly flammable gasoline that actually burns inside them. Yet none are spontaneously exploding. They absolutely are. 170,000 a year in the US alone. Some are even due to known design faults. A few years ago Ford recalled almost a million pickups due to a fire risk, and then recalled half of them again because the first fix caused another fire risk. The probability of injury or death from a vehicle fire is probably much higher than the risk of injury from wireless headphones. https://www.consumernotice.org/personal-injury/vehicle-safety/highway-vehicle-fires/ https://www.consumernotice.org/personal-injury/vehicle-safet...

romwell 5y ago
Yeah, and GM just recalled effectively all EVs they ever made. What's your point? Mine was that Bose should do the same thing with their headphones, and they won't do it out of their own accord. Also consider that there are billions of porcelain dishes made in the world, and somehow, they don't self-explode. If headphones are different in that regard, they should be, at the very least, clearly labeled as such - which is not the case.
- avianlyric 5y ago
  > GM just recalled effectively all EVs they ever made. What has this got to do with exploding ICE cars? > What's your point? I think GPs point was pretty clear. You made a completely unfounded claim, ICE cars don’t spontaneously explode, despite the fact that evidence shows they clearly do, and do so at a rate higher than headphones or EVs.
- Bud 5y ago
  I think their point was that you were pretty sloppy with your facts.
- onion2k 5y ago
  The point is that no matter how hard you try, electrical, mechanical or chemical failure will always be a risk. It's an inherent property of physical objects. It's impossibly to make them perfectly safe. Although, to be fair, given the number of objects compared to the number of failures, we're pretty close. Obviously manufacturers should attempt to minimize the risk but they'll never reduce it to zero. If you're concerned about exploding lithium ion or lithium polymer devices in your home the only recourse available to you is not to buy any. If you do that you should also be aware that corded devices also catch fire sometimes though. You should avoid those too. Maybe just avoid electrical systems entirely.

algo646464 5y ago

Don't manufacturers do that already? Take into account the probability of a costly failure, and increase the price to account for it. And compensate victims to a certain extent, but quietly. I suppose they would fight any publicity of such incidents, since that would have a huge impact on sales, I have read a few such stories, and usually they disappear from the news pretty soon, likely because the victim agreed to be quietly compensated. I could be wrong.

romwell 5y ago
>Don't manufacturers do that already? Yes they do, and this is why we have CPSC and lawsuits: to increase the cost of failure to the point where it's not a wise business decision to allow one to happen. Nothing is 100% fool-proof, but the difference between 99.9% safe and 99.99% safe is 10x decrease in incidents.

kybernetyk 5y ago

>Yet none are spontaneously exploding. Well, at lease EVs are spontaneously catching fire.

bartread 5y ago

> By an ostensibly "luxury" brand, no less. Bose aren't luxury: they're premium mediocre. They're expensive - overpriced in fact - but have a supremely competent marketing team who are probably responsible for mopping up a good portion of that premium. That doesn't make this incident any better or more excusable but it does go some way to explaining why it happened: the product is poor quality and cheaply engineered. You get what you pay for, and with Bose you are paying to be hoodwinked by flashy marketing and "brand equity".

reitzensteinm 5y ago
I wouldn't consider Bose for anything else, but the noise cancelling on this particular headset is very good. I'll probably swap to Sony next, but when I bought them there wasn't really a viable competitor.
- ghusbands 5y ago
  From what little I know, Bose has patents on a number of noise-cancelling techniques, hence making it tricky for other manufacturers to match them in noise-cancelling. However, in the past five years, several other manufacturers have done pretty well (though I believe some cross-licence patents with Bose), and Sony and Apple do lead in some comparative reviews. It is a shame that Bose's lead in noise-cancelling isn't matched in the quality of their sound.
  - Filligree 5y ago
    The Sony WX-1000s, I guess? I'm quite impressed with them. Both the noise-cancelling and sound quality are better than the QC35s I used to use.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Yes. I've tried them side-by-side (and a whole bunch of others) and the Sony came out as way better than the rest, which given my one-man boycott of Sony products after the rootkit debacle is a bit of a letdown. So I hope the boycott gods won't notice my lack of fortitude.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> the manufacturer of that lithium bomb Thing is, small lithium bombs do less damage than large ones. Now Bose makes a point of advertising the long battery-life of these devices; 20 hours, they say. Doesn't that mean that Bose is profiting from the long battery life, while failing to mention that their competitors sell cans with smaller ear-bombs in them?

Hnrobert42 5y ago

> make the cost of negligent manufacture What negligence?

ghusbands 5y ago
It's almost by definition negligent to create a product that burns the user under normal use. These sorts of incidents in the past have led to recalls, to bans on taking devices on airplanes and similar. It's no small thing.