Apple pie
This article was published in Computerra magazine # 31. The author of the article is Bird Kiwi. I considered that the article was interesting and decided to post it in full.
A link to the magazine number 31 - the article is located on page 29.
To love sausages and laws, says a long-time aphorism, do not go into the details of their manufacture. Apple products, which have gained phenomenal popularity all over the world, are equally far from sausages and lawmaking. But if everything that this famous corporation does is called “apple pie” and look at where it is baked, there will be no doubt about the validity of the aforementioned aphorism.
')
Apple, in general, has always been a duplicity. One person - extremely bright and pleasant, for some time almost glamorous - always turned to consumers, and the other - secretive, suspicious, tough and demanding - to suppliers and competitors there in business. Understanding perfectly well that only one of two faces looks attractive, the second corporation has always tried to hide under the mask. But now this mask has ceased to hold on and has begun to slip more and more noticeably.
The public, willingly buying computers and gadgets of a beloved brand, as a rule, sees Apple in the image of a very competently managed company. Here they are always extremely attentive to the aspirations of consumers, which is demonstrated wherever possible - starting with the legendary user-friendly interfaces of the systems and ending with the legions of well-trained personnel in retail networks and support services. Suppliers know Apple as a very demanding customer, uncompromising in negotiations, insisting on total secrecy in all transactions and absolutely not inclined to magnanimity if things suddenly went wrong.
This Apple has always been, especially in those times when the company was managed by Steve Jobs. Now, however, with the advent of the iPhone App Store, a service of third-party software applications, the picture has changed noticeably. This service has radically expanded the circle of Apple suppliers to include an army of independent software developers (as of August of this year, their number has already exceeded 17,000). All these people were and, as a rule, still remain loyal fans of the Apple platform. However, as suppliers, they had the opportunity to immediately encounter another, far less pleasant image of the corporation. And therefore, quite naturally, the Internet and the press have become much more sharp critical reviews about how things are going in the glorified company.
At forums dedicated to applications for iPhones, time and again, stories flash about how arrogant and harsh Apple behaves towards developers, never dropping to any explanations and simply deleting their programs from the iPhone App Store as " unsuitable. " This attitude of the company to its own fans for many was a complete surprise. For many, but not for those independent bloggers who regularly write about Apple's affairs, and especially about rumors about its upcoming new products. This category of fans was one of the first to encounter Apple's paranoid secrecy, especially when it comes to protecting secrets about new products.
There are not so many companies in the world so vengeful for those who dare to violate the established rules for the strictest control over information. Employees are fired from Apple for disclosing even insignificant information about their work, and the company itself is famous for spreading deliberate misinformation about its plans for new products among its own staff. People who had the opportunity to work in different companies unanimously claim that they have never faced such unreasonable concerns about secrecy.
According to the testimony of one of the former employees of the company, published in the New York Times, Apple personnel working on top-secret projects must pass through a labyrinth of security gateways every day, at each door again and again presenting badges with badges and entering a numeric code, to get into your workroom. As a rule, jobs are under constant video surveillance. Those employees who are employed in the most critical areas, such as testing final products, are required to cover the checked devices with black covers. If the device is removed from under a protective canopy, the employee is obliged to turn on a special red light, warning all others that it is necessary to increase vigilance.
With such a harsh secrecy regime, people working at Apple are often surprised by the company's novelties as much as everyone else. For example, Edward Eigerman, who worked at Apple as a systems engineer for four years, said his stay here coincided with the development and introduction of iPod players to the market, but he had no idea what product was created within the company. In 2005, Eigerman was fired, when he was sideways involved in an “incident” in some way - one of his colleagues, what is called a pull, introduced
business client with the capabilities of a new, not yet announced program.
According to Eygermann, Apple regularly holds events to identify and dismiss employees that allow information leaks. Another former employee, who wished to remain anonymous, said that Apple's senior vice president of marketing Philip Schiller had organized internal meetings on new products more than once and informed his colleagues of deliberately false information about prices or product features. After that, news that coincided with the “misinformation” was sought out in the press, and the hunt began for the owners of too long a language.
Apple has often launched misinformation directly through reporters or analysts from consulting companies. As Gene Munster, a long-time Apple analyst at Piper Jaffray, says, four years ago, one of the chief directors of the corporation personally told him that Apple had no interest in developing a cheap iPod without a display. Soon, however, stores filled up with just such a product - the iPod Shuffle.
Five years ago, Apple’s obsession with secrets reached its peak - the corporation set out to prohibit, through the courts, a discussion of its upcoming products on the Internet. Lawyers for the company started a lawsuit with several bloggers who regularly cover the internal affairs of Apple, and tried to prove that they violate the laws on commercial secrets and do not have the right to free speech, guaranteed by the constitution. The California Court of Appeals, however, sided with the bloggers, so the company that was completely lost the case was forced to pay 700 thousand dollars of legal costs. However, Apple managed to cover up some well-informed blogs (in particular, Think Secret), but not through the courts, but with the help of backstage talks and, of course, a solid dollar injection.
No matter how strict the norms of “regime secrecy” at Apple were, even in comparison with them, the measures that were taken in 2009 to conceal information about the state of health of the co-founder and executive director of the company Steve Jobs turned out to be unprecedented. Since the very fact of considerable health problems in such a well-known person who was constantly in sight was almost impossible to hide, and Apple stubbornly shied away from honest discussion of this topic, a parallel with the Kremlin itself was born in the press during the decline of the Soviet empire - when the country tried to rule a series of weak people elders, and their state of health was considered one of the most important state secrets.
Against the background of the company's traditional secrecy, this parallel looks particularly expressive, since Apple’s PR style — communicating with the public and the press exclusively through official press releases — is often compared to the once famous Pravda style, the main ideological mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Now, when the key details of this entire story with the head of Apple’s disease are already known, the general outline of events looks like this. Taking a semiannual vacation in early January, ostensibly for the correction of "hormonal imbalance", Steve Jobs underwent an extensive course of treatment, first in connection with pancreatic cancer, and then with liver transplantation. Liver transplantation was performed by Jobs in late April or early May, but this became known only at the end of June.
Despite the keen interest of news services and investors in Jobs' health, Apple officials decisively refused to discuss this issue, reiterating that the head of the company would return to his duties at the end of June.
Now that Jobs is at the helm again, one of the hottest debated topics among corporate governance experts is whether Apple has violated Apple’s laws that dictate the amount of information companies must disclose to the public regarding the health of their top executives. Some claim that Apple was not required to report a Jobs liver transplant, as long as he was on official leave and shifted responsibility for the daily affairs of the company to another director. Other experts are convinced that, taking into account liver transplantation, Apple’s official statement of January of this year - that Mr. Jobs is only worried about hormonal imbalance - looks like a blatant and deliberate lie.
However, we have to admit that no one has any reliable details about the medical side of this story.
However, in this immense topic “Apple, health and PR problems” there is another, much more disturbing aspect. For with almost the same zeal that was shown in protecting secrets about Jobs's diseases, the corporation tries to hide any information about the damage to health that Apple products inflict on consumers. By now, in particular, it is known that there are at least several dozen people who have received sensitive burns from defective batteries in iPods (see “Very Hot Topic”). However, no one knows the exact figures, as the company carefully hides them, and with each of the victims it enters into a personal agreement “on non-disclosure” of the incident details - as a necessary condition for receiving compensation from the company.
Obviously, not the most successful approach that has long been established in Apple — all security problems solved by “ideological” methods of the PR unit — extends to such technical areas as computer security or information security.
Experts in this field have long known that the protection of Apple computers and gadgets from hacking, information theft and other abuse of compromise is not good. However, authoritative experts do not like to talk publicly about this, preferring to keep quiet on the sidelines. The reason is quite understandable here and is that Apple’s usual response to the publication of some new-minded hole is to quietly set a group of faithful Mac-fans on the author who are joining the researcher’s personality, hampering a person with dirt and haying at all Internet crossings , so that then it takes a long time to move away from these empty essentially, but emotionally painful attacks.
However, along with a noticeable increase in the share of the computer market acquired by Apple among Mac users, there are more and more critically-minded people and security specialists. For this reason, at least in part, the traditional methods of PR attacks are becoming less and less effective. An illustrative illustration of this is popular hacker conferences like Black Hat in the United States or CanSecWest in Canada, where the frankly weak protection of Apple machines is increasingly being discussed.
For the past ten years, this kind of hacker forums have been a real curse for Microsoft. And to a large extent, it was the criticism from the stands of these conferences that finally forced the Redmond people to seriously tackle the security problems in Windows programs. Today, the focus is shifting to the Mac platform, and there is good reason to believe that Apple products are no more secure today than the Microsoft programs used to be.
Worse, since Apple acts as a supplier of an increasingly popular software and hardware platform, and not just software, this company occupies a unique place in the market in terms of security. For example, the latest Black Hat showed that a regular Apple computer keyboard, equipped with its own brains in the form of a controller and flash memory, can be used as an undetectable keylogger - a keystroke interceptor to steal passwords and other confidential information. Or another example - it was demonstrated that iPhone phones can be used to disable mobile networks.
Apple’s trouble lies not so much in the numerous security holes in its products as in relation to the exposure of vulnerabilities. And what to expect from a company focused primarily on marketing. However, we can not say that Apple does not patch its system - of course, it does, like all other market participants. But Apple is sure to this day that it’s much better not to talk about the weaknesses found in its products.
Whenever arguing about the phenomenon of Apple, the debaters try to find at least some kind of consensus, it sounds like this view of the secrets of the apple pie: it seems that excessive secrecy, which certainly adds surprise charm to every Apple ad about new products, doesn’t serve a company like that same well in all other areas.
In many cases, the transparency of a corporation is much more important - and the more information it gives to the public and the market, the better for everyone. Therefore, it is very strange that a company, sincerely considering itself to be the leader of innovations, at the same time appears before us buttoned up to all buttons.
One of the features of the new iPhone handsets
3GS is hardware-based data encryption, which seems to be giving consumers the impression that valuable information stored in the memory of the device is now less dangerous than in previous models. However, a well-known security expert has demonstrated that simple hacking tools allow you to access these data as easily as in non-encrypted devices.
The problem here is even wider, as Apple tried to increase security measures in new iPhones in two ways. The first is encrypted data archiving available on any phone with iPhone OS 3.0 and iTunes 8.2 or later. The second is the same hardware encryption available only for iPhone 3GS series models. With a superficial acquaintance, this all looks pretty solid, but the iPhone expert Jonathan Zdziarski, who teaches criminal data on the special course on data access in Apple gadgets, has publicly shown how easily this imaginary protection costs.
There is no doubt that new encryption will only scare away random curious users. However, serious intruders, armed with unlock and jailbreak software such as purplera1n or redsn0w (which can be easily found on the Web), will easily remove the protection and get access to all data in the phone. In a video posted on the Internet, Zdzarski demonstrates how quickly this can be done not only for an encrypted iPhone archive, but also for current iPhone 3GS data protected by hardware encryption.
The special piquancy of the trick lies in the fact that the expert does not even need to bother with decoding. Zdzarski shows that he can access the file system of the iPhone in the same way as in any other UNIX-based operating system (Zdzdarski uses the original software, but the same result can be achieved with the help of jailbreak tools). After that, the OS readily launches hardware decryption of the data and provides it to the user: “The kernel decrypts the data for you when you simply request files, so that a decrypted copy is automatically issued in response to the call”. The only advantage that encryption implemented in this way provides is that now you can remotely erase all data much faster in case of loss of the device, since it is enough just to destroy the cryptokey. But even this advantage becomes useless if the abductor of the iPhone guesses to remove the SIM card. As an option to remotely erase data, so
and the function "Find my iPhone" without a SIM card just does not work. Unlike data access.
Amy Clancy, a reporter for KIRO7 (Seattle), spent more than half a year getting from the CPSC, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, a file of cases of ignition of Apple iPods. Apple’s lawyers managed to block the inquiries of a journalist several times, but in the end, eight hundred pages of “compromising” were still able to be opened for the first time to the general public.
A journalistic investigation began last November when a radio listener named Jamie Balderas turned to reporters about a burn on his chest, which was attached to the shirt of an iPod Shuffle player. At first, Balderas tried to find out from Apple how often this happens, but a company representative assured her that this was an isolated case. When she asked whether it was possible to obtain documents from the company about such incidents and what was done to prevent them, Apple said that Balderas would not get access to such materials.
The secrecy of the company is easy to understand, since information about the real picture of the player’s spontaneous combustion may well be the reason for recalling the most popular products, released in hundreds of millions of copies, from the market, which will result in huge losses. Moreover, the documents that Amy Clancy mined in the federal control bodies show that, in principle, recall of products is quite possible. One of the reasons why the CPSC commission did not apply any sanctions to Apple and did not insist on recalling defective products was that “the current generation of iPods use [other] batteries that did not demonstrate the problems that old batteries had”.
Journalists have not yet been able to figure out exactly when the use of the “current generation” of batteries began. However, now there is more evidence, including direct lawsuits against Apple, according to which even brand new iPod Touch, that is one of the latest player models, will ignite and explode.
A link to the magazine number 31 - the article is located on page 29.
To love sausages and laws, says a long-time aphorism, do not go into the details of their manufacture. Apple products, which have gained phenomenal popularity all over the world, are equally far from sausages and lawmaking. But if everything that this famous corporation does is called “apple pie” and look at where it is baked, there will be no doubt about the validity of the aforementioned aphorism.
')
Apple, in general, has always been a duplicity. One person - extremely bright and pleasant, for some time almost glamorous - always turned to consumers, and the other - secretive, suspicious, tough and demanding - to suppliers and competitors there in business. Understanding perfectly well that only one of two faces looks attractive, the second corporation has always tried to hide under the mask. But now this mask has ceased to hold on and has begun to slip more and more noticeably.
The public, willingly buying computers and gadgets of a beloved brand, as a rule, sees Apple in the image of a very competently managed company. Here they are always extremely attentive to the aspirations of consumers, which is demonstrated wherever possible - starting with the legendary user-friendly interfaces of the systems and ending with the legions of well-trained personnel in retail networks and support services. Suppliers know Apple as a very demanding customer, uncompromising in negotiations, insisting on total secrecy in all transactions and absolutely not inclined to magnanimity if things suddenly went wrong.
This Apple has always been, especially in those times when the company was managed by Steve Jobs. Now, however, with the advent of the iPhone App Store, a service of third-party software applications, the picture has changed noticeably. This service has radically expanded the circle of Apple suppliers to include an army of independent software developers (as of August of this year, their number has already exceeded 17,000). All these people were and, as a rule, still remain loyal fans of the Apple platform. However, as suppliers, they had the opportunity to immediately encounter another, far less pleasant image of the corporation. And therefore, quite naturally, the Internet and the press have become much more sharp critical reviews about how things are going in the glorified company.
It looks like a special service
At forums dedicated to applications for iPhones, time and again, stories flash about how arrogant and harsh Apple behaves towards developers, never dropping to any explanations and simply deleting their programs from the iPhone App Store as " unsuitable. " This attitude of the company to its own fans for many was a complete surprise. For many, but not for those independent bloggers who regularly write about Apple's affairs, and especially about rumors about its upcoming new products. This category of fans was one of the first to encounter Apple's paranoid secrecy, especially when it comes to protecting secrets about new products.
There are not so many companies in the world so vengeful for those who dare to violate the established rules for the strictest control over information. Employees are fired from Apple for disclosing even insignificant information about their work, and the company itself is famous for spreading deliberate misinformation about its plans for new products among its own staff. People who had the opportunity to work in different companies unanimously claim that they have never faced such unreasonable concerns about secrecy.
According to the testimony of one of the former employees of the company, published in the New York Times, Apple personnel working on top-secret projects must pass through a labyrinth of security gateways every day, at each door again and again presenting badges with badges and entering a numeric code, to get into your workroom. As a rule, jobs are under constant video surveillance. Those employees who are employed in the most critical areas, such as testing final products, are required to cover the checked devices with black covers. If the device is removed from under a protective canopy, the employee is obliged to turn on a special red light, warning all others that it is necessary to increase vigilance.
With such a harsh secrecy regime, people working at Apple are often surprised by the company's novelties as much as everyone else. For example, Edward Eigerman, who worked at Apple as a systems engineer for four years, said his stay here coincided with the development and introduction of iPod players to the market, but he had no idea what product was created within the company. In 2005, Eigerman was fired, when he was sideways involved in an “incident” in some way - one of his colleagues, what is called a pull, introduced
business client with the capabilities of a new, not yet announced program.
According to Eygermann, Apple regularly holds events to identify and dismiss employees that allow information leaks. Another former employee, who wished to remain anonymous, said that Apple's senior vice president of marketing Philip Schiller had organized internal meetings on new products more than once and informed his colleagues of deliberately false information about prices or product features. After that, news that coincided with the “misinformation” was sought out in the press, and the hunt began for the owners of too long a language.
Apple has often launched misinformation directly through reporters or analysts from consulting companies. As Gene Munster, a long-time Apple analyst at Piper Jaffray, says, four years ago, one of the chief directors of the corporation personally told him that Apple had no interest in developing a cheap iPod without a display. Soon, however, stores filled up with just such a product - the iPod Shuffle.
Five years ago, Apple’s obsession with secrets reached its peak - the corporation set out to prohibit, through the courts, a discussion of its upcoming products on the Internet. Lawyers for the company started a lawsuit with several bloggers who regularly cover the internal affairs of Apple, and tried to prove that they violate the laws on commercial secrets and do not have the right to free speech, guaranteed by the constitution. The California Court of Appeals, however, sided with the bloggers, so the company that was completely lost the case was forced to pay 700 thousand dollars of legal costs. However, Apple managed to cover up some well-informed blogs (in particular, Think Secret), but not through the courts, but with the help of backstage talks and, of course, a solid dollar injection.
Kremlin style
No matter how strict the norms of “regime secrecy” at Apple were, even in comparison with them, the measures that were taken in 2009 to conceal information about the state of health of the co-founder and executive director of the company Steve Jobs turned out to be unprecedented. Since the very fact of considerable health problems in such a well-known person who was constantly in sight was almost impossible to hide, and Apple stubbornly shied away from honest discussion of this topic, a parallel with the Kremlin itself was born in the press during the decline of the Soviet empire - when the country tried to rule a series of weak people elders, and their state of health was considered one of the most important state secrets.
Against the background of the company's traditional secrecy, this parallel looks particularly expressive, since Apple’s PR style — communicating with the public and the press exclusively through official press releases — is often compared to the once famous Pravda style, the main ideological mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Now, when the key details of this entire story with the head of Apple’s disease are already known, the general outline of events looks like this. Taking a semiannual vacation in early January, ostensibly for the correction of "hormonal imbalance", Steve Jobs underwent an extensive course of treatment, first in connection with pancreatic cancer, and then with liver transplantation. Liver transplantation was performed by Jobs in late April or early May, but this became known only at the end of June.
Despite the keen interest of news services and investors in Jobs' health, Apple officials decisively refused to discuss this issue, reiterating that the head of the company would return to his duties at the end of June.
Now that Jobs is at the helm again, one of the hottest debated topics among corporate governance experts is whether Apple has violated Apple’s laws that dictate the amount of information companies must disclose to the public regarding the health of their top executives. Some claim that Apple was not required to report a Jobs liver transplant, as long as he was on official leave and shifted responsibility for the daily affairs of the company to another director. Other experts are convinced that, taking into account liver transplantation, Apple’s official statement of January of this year - that Mr. Jobs is only worried about hormonal imbalance - looks like a blatant and deliberate lie.
However, we have to admit that no one has any reliable details about the medical side of this story.
However, in this immense topic “Apple, health and PR problems” there is another, much more disturbing aspect. For with almost the same zeal that was shown in protecting secrets about Jobs's diseases, the corporation tries to hide any information about the damage to health that Apple products inflict on consumers. By now, in particular, it is known that there are at least several dozen people who have received sensitive burns from defective batteries in iPods (see “Very Hot Topic”). However, no one knows the exact figures, as the company carefully hides them, and with each of the victims it enters into a personal agreement “on non-disclosure” of the incident details - as a necessary condition for receiving compensation from the company.
Benefits that are not
Obviously, not the most successful approach that has long been established in Apple — all security problems solved by “ideological” methods of the PR unit — extends to such technical areas as computer security or information security.
Experts in this field have long known that the protection of Apple computers and gadgets from hacking, information theft and other abuse of compromise is not good. However, authoritative experts do not like to talk publicly about this, preferring to keep quiet on the sidelines. The reason is quite understandable here and is that Apple’s usual response to the publication of some new-minded hole is to quietly set a group of faithful Mac-fans on the author who are joining the researcher’s personality, hampering a person with dirt and haying at all Internet crossings , so that then it takes a long time to move away from these empty essentially, but emotionally painful attacks.
However, along with a noticeable increase in the share of the computer market acquired by Apple among Mac users, there are more and more critically-minded people and security specialists. For this reason, at least in part, the traditional methods of PR attacks are becoming less and less effective. An illustrative illustration of this is popular hacker conferences like Black Hat in the United States or CanSecWest in Canada, where the frankly weak protection of Apple machines is increasingly being discussed.
For the past ten years, this kind of hacker forums have been a real curse for Microsoft. And to a large extent, it was the criticism from the stands of these conferences that finally forced the Redmond people to seriously tackle the security problems in Windows programs. Today, the focus is shifting to the Mac platform, and there is good reason to believe that Apple products are no more secure today than the Microsoft programs used to be.
Worse, since Apple acts as a supplier of an increasingly popular software and hardware platform, and not just software, this company occupies a unique place in the market in terms of security. For example, the latest Black Hat showed that a regular Apple computer keyboard, equipped with its own brains in the form of a controller and flash memory, can be used as an undetectable keylogger - a keystroke interceptor to steal passwords and other confidential information. Or another example - it was demonstrated that iPhone phones can be used to disable mobile networks.
Apple’s trouble lies not so much in the numerous security holes in its products as in relation to the exposure of vulnerabilities. And what to expect from a company focused primarily on marketing. However, we can not say that Apple does not patch its system - of course, it does, like all other market participants. But Apple is sure to this day that it’s much better not to talk about the weaknesses found in its products.
Whenever arguing about the phenomenon of Apple, the debaters try to find at least some kind of consensus, it sounds like this view of the secrets of the apple pie: it seems that excessive secrecy, which certainly adds surprise charm to every Apple ad about new products, doesn’t serve a company like that same well in all other areas.
In many cases, the transparency of a corporation is much more important - and the more information it gives to the public and the market, the better for everyone. Therefore, it is very strange that a company, sincerely considering itself to be the leader of innovations, at the same time appears before us buttoned up to all buttons.
How would encryption
One of the features of the new iPhone handsets
3GS is hardware-based data encryption, which seems to be giving consumers the impression that valuable information stored in the memory of the device is now less dangerous than in previous models. However, a well-known security expert has demonstrated that simple hacking tools allow you to access these data as easily as in non-encrypted devices.
The problem here is even wider, as Apple tried to increase security measures in new iPhones in two ways. The first is encrypted data archiving available on any phone with iPhone OS 3.0 and iTunes 8.2 or later. The second is the same hardware encryption available only for iPhone 3GS series models. With a superficial acquaintance, this all looks pretty solid, but the iPhone expert Jonathan Zdziarski, who teaches criminal data on the special course on data access in Apple gadgets, has publicly shown how easily this imaginary protection costs.
There is no doubt that new encryption will only scare away random curious users. However, serious intruders, armed with unlock and jailbreak software such as purplera1n or redsn0w (which can be easily found on the Web), will easily remove the protection and get access to all data in the phone. In a video posted on the Internet, Zdzarski demonstrates how quickly this can be done not only for an encrypted iPhone archive, but also for current iPhone 3GS data protected by hardware encryption.
The special piquancy of the trick lies in the fact that the expert does not even need to bother with decoding. Zdzarski shows that he can access the file system of the iPhone in the same way as in any other UNIX-based operating system (Zdzdarski uses the original software, but the same result can be achieved with the help of jailbreak tools). After that, the OS readily launches hardware decryption of the data and provides it to the user: “The kernel decrypts the data for you when you simply request files, so that a decrypted copy is automatically issued in response to the call”. The only advantage that encryption implemented in this way provides is that now you can remotely erase all data much faster in case of loss of the device, since it is enough just to destroy the cryptokey. But even this advantage becomes useless if the abductor of the iPhone guesses to remove the SIM card. As an option to remotely erase data, so
and the function "Find my iPhone" without a SIM card just does not work. Unlike data access.
Very hot topic
Amy Clancy, a reporter for KIRO7 (Seattle), spent more than half a year getting from the CPSC, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, a file of cases of ignition of Apple iPods. Apple’s lawyers managed to block the inquiries of a journalist several times, but in the end, eight hundred pages of “compromising” were still able to be opened for the first time to the general public.
A journalistic investigation began last November when a radio listener named Jamie Balderas turned to reporters about a burn on his chest, which was attached to the shirt of an iPod Shuffle player. At first, Balderas tried to find out from Apple how often this happens, but a company representative assured her that this was an isolated case. When she asked whether it was possible to obtain documents from the company about such incidents and what was done to prevent them, Apple said that Balderas would not get access to such materials.
The secrecy of the company is easy to understand, since information about the real picture of the player’s spontaneous combustion may well be the reason for recalling the most popular products, released in hundreds of millions of copies, from the market, which will result in huge losses. Moreover, the documents that Amy Clancy mined in the federal control bodies show that, in principle, recall of products is quite possible. One of the reasons why the CPSC commission did not apply any sanctions to Apple and did not insist on recalling defective products was that “the current generation of iPods use [other] batteries that did not demonstrate the problems that old batteries had”.
Journalists have not yet been able to figure out exactly when the use of the “current generation” of batteries began. However, now there is more evidence, including direct lawsuits against Apple, according to which even brand new iPod Touch, that is one of the latest player models, will ignite and explode.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/75477/
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