Yahoo News You can pry this Galaxy Note7 from my cold, possibly scorched hands
Editor's note: Mashable does not condone keeping your Galaxy Note7, and in fact has recommended strongly against it. This viewpoint is the author's alone, and his judgment is obviously questionable.
LOS ANGELES — I'm keeping it.
My Samsung Galaxy Note7 — an original, I haven't exchanged it and don't plan to — works just fine, as I suspect the vast majority of the other still-unburned Note 7s quickly stacking in an undisclosed warehouse location probably do.
Yeah, yeah, I've seen the warnings, gotten the grim texts from my carrier, heard tales of airline pilots throwing shade over the PA. Damon Beres, Mashable Deputy Tech Editor, wrote that "it's now irresponsible, even dangerous, to own a Note7."
SEE ALSO: These pics of a burnt Samsung Galaxy Note 7 are terrifying
Oh, but how people love to imagine themselves in imminent danger, and the feeling they are taking every precaution to keep it on the other side of the door. It's what gave us bloodletting, jack o' lanterns, M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, actual tinfoil hats and tens of millions of tweets about Donald Trump.
But hold on — can we take a math break for a second?
Because when you do that, owning this supposed ticking time bomb is still statistically less dangerous than the act of getting in your car. Which you'll probably have to do to bring it back.
Image: Mashable/alena alambeigi
Samsung has issued something like 2.5 million handsets (not counting replacement phones) since the mid-August launch. In the nearly two months that followed, slightly less than 100 phones have reportedly "exploded," including a handful of the reissues.
How does that compare with other, more timeworn calamities?
The rate of Galaxy Note7 battery blazes is 1 in 25,000. No one has died from this — injuries minimal — though quite a few folks have scored some very dramatic photos.
If you drive in the state of California, as I do, there is a 1 in 12,778 probability that you will be killed in a traffic accident, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Federal Highway Administration.
If you walk about the Earth and live to be 80, there is a 1 in 13,000 chance that you will be struck by lightning, according to the National Oceanic and Atmostpheric Administration.
A colleague suggested that there might have been a lot more phones exploding were a recall not issued. Though possible, it's not knowable. It's also possible, and not knowable, that the phones that were going to explode mostly already did, and that further combustion incidents taper off.
Is any of this cause to "immediately power down" and hand over what Mashable once called "the greatest smartphone on the planet?" Reason enough to go through the trauma of reconfiguring yet another new phone?
For that answer we turn to the 1999 cult classic Fight Club.
Early in the film, "The Narrator" (Ed Norton) explains his occupation as an insurance actuary, whose job it is to dispassionately determine whether an auto manufacturer should invest in recalling a defect.
From the script:
That's on a large scale, from the perspective of the manufacturer. But downscaling that formula and flipping it around for just me — and assuming an "exploding" phone will merely self-destruct, not kill or seriously maim anyone — that equation looks like this:
A (number of phones) = 1
B (odds of exploding) = 1/25,000
C (cost of the phone) = about $800
X (A x B x C) = $0.032
In this case, X (3 cents) is significantly less than the cost of participating in Samsung's recall (time, hassle, device downgrade, etc.). Put another way, would you pay three pennies to avoid going through all that — and with the added bonus of still having the planet's best smartphone?
Yeah, me too.
I'm keeping it.
