So Samsung made it official today. The Note 7 is dead. Not "we're pausing sales" dead, not "we're investigating" dead. Actually dead, as in stop using it, power it down, don't even leave it charging overnight, we'll refund you or swap you into something else. Every major US carrier (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint) had already stopped doing exchanges for the thing almost a week ago, and now Samsung's just pulled the plug on the whole line entirely.
I want to talk about one specific moment in this saga because I think it's the part that actually made this real for people, more than any press release did. On October 5th a Southwest flight out of Louisville had to be evacuated on the tarmac because a passenger's phone started smoking in his pocket. Not his original Note 7 — his replacement one. The one Samsung had shipped out as the safe version, in the box with the black square instead of the green battery icon, the one people lined up at Best Buy to trade into. Smoke pouring out of an airplane seat because of a phone is the kind of thing that turns an abstract recall notice into something you tell your coworkers about at lunch.
That's the part that got me. Samsung spent weeks telling everyone the replacement units were fine, safe, go ahead and swap. And then the replacement units started doing the exact same thing. At that point what do you even tell people? "Trust us, this time for real" doesn't work twice.
My brother-in-law had one of the originals. Loved it, honestly. He's a stylus guy, does actual work with the S Pen, sketches out home renovation plans on it, and he was annoyed as hell when he had to trade it in back in September for the "fixed" version. Now he's stuck holding a phone Samsung is telling him to literally turn off and never touch again, and going back to whatever he had before, probably an S7 Edge or an iPhone if he really wants to abandon ship. I don't think he's bitter about the situation so much as just tired of dealing with two separate device swaps for the same phone in under two months.
What strikes me is how unprecedented the language is. I can't think of another consumer electronics recall where the company's actual instruction was "power off the device and stop using it," full stop, not "keep using it carefully" or "avoid overcharging it." That's not a recall notice, that's closer to a hazmat warning. And it's not like the Note 7 was some budget device nobody cared about — this was Samsung's flagship, the phone that was supposed to answer the iPhone 7 this fall, complete with the curved screen, the iris scanner, all of it. Reviews were genuinely glowing before any of this started. That's what makes it sting more than a typical recall of some random product you forgot you owned.
I don't have a Note 7 myself (I'm still on an aging Nexus 6P, which has its own battery quirks I try not to think about too hard), but I've been half-following this since late August when the first fires started showing up on Reddit. Watching it go from "isolated incidents" to "actually just don't own this phone at all" over the span of about six weeks has been kind of remarkable, and not in a good way for Samsung's engineering reputation heading into 2017.
The financial number being thrown around is something like a billion dollars in losses just from this line, and that's before you count whatever this does to trust in the Note brand going forward. Hard to imagine there's a Note 8 that doesn't spend its entire launch cycle answering questions about batteries catching fire, whenever that ends up shipping.
Anyway. If you've still got one of these sitting in a drawer or, worse, in your pocket, today's the day to actually do something about it instead of putting it off.