What's Apple trying to hide? Apparently, when it comes to the notion that Apple's iPods are potentially lethal weapons capable of overheating and bursting into flame at a moment's notice, a lot. There's some 800 pages of documents from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) detailing how iPods have been seen to smoke, catch fire and sometimes burn their owners.
Of course, Apple's lawyers didn't want you to know that. That's what a consumer affairs reporter from KIRO 7 TV, a Seattle-based TV station, found out when she tried to follow up on a complaint from an Arlington, Wash.-based iPod Shuffle owner who'd told KIRO she'd suffered a burn on her chest following her iPod overheating while she was jogging.
According to the story posted on KIRO TV's Web site, it took more than seven months to get a look at the CPSC's documents thanks to a series of exemptions filed by Apple's phalanx of lawyers. Even before that, the woman who first told KIRO 7 about the burn, Jamie Balderas, said she had contacted Apple and been refused a request for documentation to see how often fellow iPod users had registered complaints about iPod-related burns.
Of course, stories of overheating iPods are nothing new -- go to the internet like KIRO 7's reporter did, and you can read first-hand accounts and see plenty of eye-popping photos of alleged iPod burns. Earlier this month, Apple recalled first generation iPod Nano players in South Korea following reports from the Korea Agency for Technology and Standards that the batteries were exploding.
The CPSC's documents don't paint Apple iPod as a major cause for concern, as they indicate that "the number of incidents is extremely small in relation to the number of products produced, making the risk of injury very low."
But that's not the takeaway -- Apple's stonewalling tactics are. And for a company that tries harder than most any other in its tier to protect its image -- sometimes, it's been suggested, to the point of life-endangering paranoia and pressure -- the moves by Apple's lawyers are enough to give pause.
