Samsung Galaxy Note 7

» see samsung.com/galaxy-note7 as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the galaxy note 7 was the first phone i can remember airport PA systems calling out by name. every gate in ankara esenboğa, every istanbul atatürk announcement in the october '16 window mentioned it. the FAA banned it worldwide on 14 october, turkish airlines followed the same day. by then the model was already discontinued.

samsung unveiled the note 7 on 2 august 2016 at an unpacked event in new york, shipping began on 19 august in a handful of markets and rolled out globally over the next two weeks. pre-orders had exceeded supply in every market samsung tracked. it was the phone samsung had bet its android year on, the iris scanner and the curved dual-edge display were the two feature stories reviewers led with.

the first battery fire reports arrived within about a week of shipping. by 2 september samsung had announced an informal global recall, by 15 september the US consumer product safety commission had converted it into a formal one. the replacement units, which were supposed to have fixed batteries from a different supplier, then began catching fire in early october. samsung stopped production on 10 october, formally discontinued the model on 11 october.

~ the case file ~

~ the batteries ~

the postmortem samsung published in january 2017 identified two separate failure modes in two separate battery suppliers. original batteries had electrodes on the top-right corner susceptible to bending, which weakened the separation between the positive and negative terminals. replacement batteries had a welding defect that pushed electrodes upward and caused internal damage. same product, two different causes, both leading to thermal runaway.

the interesting bit was that the second failure mode arrived from a supplier samsung had switched to specifically because the first one was suspect. the replacement program itself introduced the second batch of fires. that is the part that made the recall famous rather than routine.

~ the airport moment ~

in fairness, the october '16 airport window was the moment a specific consumer electronics product entered global aviation policy language. the FAA prohibition of 14 october covered checked baggage and carry-on. it also covered devices that were switched off. gate agents were reading the model name aloud during boarding announcements. turkish airlines and lufthansa issued the same restriction inside the first 48 hours, most other carriers followed within a week. the phone became a category the airlines had to explain to passengers.

in those days the samsung retail booths at ankara panora avm still had note 7 dummies on display for a few more weeks before staff pulled them. the exchange program in turkey ran through the samsung.com.tr returns portal and physical brand shops. by early '17 the note 7 was gone from the shelves in a way that made the s7 and s7 edge suddenly the flagship line samsung would talk about.

~ the funny part ~

the second-order irony is that samsung's later note and s-series phones inherited a much more cautious battery certification process, an eight-point safety check that samsung publicised specifically to reassure the market. the note 7 fires wrote the internal QA regime for every samsung flagship that followed. the note brand itself was retired after the note 20 in 2020, folded into the galaxy s ultra line.

the residual note 7 units samsung recovered were dismantled for materials, the ones that stayed in consumer hands were remotely bricked over the next year through firmware updates that limited charging capacity to zero. the model is one of the few consumer products of the decade whose last software update was a kill switch.

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