Apple is burking incidents of iPod exploding

According to the Times, Apple tried to reach a confidential settlement with a father and daughter after the child’s iPod music player exploded and the family sought a refund from the company. The family would be offered a full refund only if they were willing to sign a settlement form. The proposed agreement left them open to legal action if they ever disclosed the terms of the settlement.

Ken Stanborough, 47, from Liverpool, threw his 11-year-old daughter Ellie’s iPod Touch out of his back door, where “within 30 seconds there was a pop, a big puff of smoke and it went 10ft in the air”. Mr Stanborough contacted Apple and Argos, where he had bought the device for £162. Apple sent a letter to Mr Stanborough denying liability but offering a refund. Mr. Stanborough refused to sign it saying he asked for his money back but not for compensation.

Furthermore, the case echoes previous circumstances in which Apple attempted to hush up incidents when its devices overheated. Last week it emerged that Apple had tried to keep a number of cases where its iPod digital music players had started to smoke, burst into flames and even burned their owners, out of the public eye. In addition, a number of bloggers have reported cases where iPods have exploded, usually involving older versions of the digital music players. Last year the Japanese Government warned that iPod Nanos presented a potential fire risk, saying there had been 14 cases in the country where the players had caught alight, with two people suffering minor burns.

An American reporter obtained 800 pages of documentation on the cases from the Consumer Product Safety Commission following a Freedom of Information Act request in that country. According to CPSC investigators, the source of the problem could be iPods’ lithium ion batteries. Thus, in 2006 Apple and Dell recalled millions of lithium ion batteries because of overheating problems in laptop computers causing fires, some of the biggest consumer electronics recalls in history. As of September last year, 173,000,000 iPods have been sold worldwide.

An Apple spokesman said that, as the company had not looked at the Stanboroughs’ damaged iPod, it could not comment.