Sony Battles Myth of Hardware ‘Kill Switch’
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By Brian X. Chen
- January 25, 2010 |
- 1:55 pm |
- Categories: Miscellaneous
Are Sony products ticking “fail” bombs just waiting to go off? Many consumers in Japan still subscribe to the belief that the tech titan purposely designed its devices to break immediately after their warranty expires, according to a report.
The Telegraph reports on the “timer” myth that has plagued Sony for 20 years. It started out as an urban legend that the tech-obsessed Japanese had joked about in manga and vented about in online forums. But in 2006, the recall of more than 4.1 million Dell laptops containing faulty Sony batteries drove the rumor into social consciousness as a serious theory. (If you include laptops made by Sony, Toshiba, Lenovo, Fujitsu and Apple in addition to Dell, the grand total was actually 9.6 million laptop batteries worldwide, according to a previous Wired report.)
Explosive batteries greatly damaged Sony’s reputation. The company has been working to dispel the timer myth for years, but every incident of product failure post-warranty perpetuates the legend. Sony’s PlayStation 3 still remains highly popular because it is allegedly exempt from the timers’ curse, according to the Telegraph. (My PS3 hard drive died 3 months post-warranty, mind you, but that was probably due to my two-month-long obsession with playing Borderlands.)
“For a nation proud of their technological innovations, burning laptops and the biggest product recall in history were not exactly easy to deal with,” the Telegraph wrote. It’s a fascinating story by the Telegraph definitely worth a read.
See Also:
- Sony Flaunts 3-D TVs, Taylor Swift to Regain Its Cool
- Laptop Fires Prompt Sony Battery Recall — Again
- Sony in Bad Need of Recharging
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Hope that don’t happen to my PS3.
I’ve had Sony stuff last considerably past its warranty and I’ve had Sony stuff that was complete crap. Overall I’d say I’ve been happier with Sony than with Toshiba or LG.
Sony is such an upstanding company, they would never do such a thing (cough, rootkits, cough!)
I dunno, I can’t remember anything Sony that died on me too soon. I purchased an ultra-thin Walkman back in the late 80s… wonderful thing, it was barely bigger than the cassette it played, worked with a single AA battery… I would still have it had a friend not helped himself to it.
I think as geeks, the best thing we can do is to subtly encourage such rumors. Like it or not, most electronic products ARE engineered to just barely make it past their warranty dates. By spreading the word that the internal mechanism is actually designed to fail, the only recourse the manufacturers like Sony have is to make products that actually last longer than a couple of years.
I have not had much of this happening on any Sony products that I’ve owned; but I’ve always had the inclination that Gateway did this because I’ve worked at a place that exclusively uses Gateways and about 75% to 80% of the systems we’ve owned started to failed or died two weeks after the warranty goes out and they all do it in group of about 4 systems at a time. We ended up switching to Dell due to the fact that Gateway started to send us junk part for out warranted systems. I have on multiple occasions received replacement CD Rom drives with fragments of entire CD that had exploded in the drives.
I see similar things. It seems a bit odd when computers we have been using for the last 2 years all have video card failures within 3-4 days of each other. Not every single one seems to fail but when 75 of 260 go it makes you start to wonder.
bad application of Planned Obsolescence??
I’ve locally seen groups of HP PC’s blow their power supplies, within 30 days outside of warranty.
Bad run of power supply capacitors or power regulators were usually to blame.
Had a recent 2-dozen or so TrendNet firewalls start going stupid on customers, over a 60 day period - just outside of warranty.
Makes one wonder…