Apple Sued. Why? iPod Causes Hearing Loss.

Thursday, February 2, 2006 | Commentary | Read or Post a Comment

Ear An iPod owner has sued Apple and claims the iPod causes hearing loss in people who use it. What’s next? People suing McDonald’s and claiming Mickey D caused them to become fat?

Wait. My bad. That’s already happened. McDonald’s is mainstream so you’d expect that kind of thing. Mickey D’s has also been sued because their hot coffee is hot. Go figure.

How about this one? Let’s sue McDonald’s in a class action affair alledging that McDonald’s causes tooth decay.

I had.... (excerpted).

2 Reader Comments

to josh said:

Hey josh b:

1. Apple includes a warning that listening at loud volumes can cause hearing loss.

2. Every music player in the world has the potential to damage hearing.

3. Apple doesn’t have to do #### to prevent it, they’ve done enough by including the warning about something most sane people knew anyway. Natural selection; the kid who eats too many marbles doesn’t live to tell the story, the person who listens to his music too loud deserves hearing loss.

I laugh at this frivolous lawsuit, but cry at the monetary loss this will cause Apple due to court fees, and the lost goodwill because there WILL be some frickin idiots out there who take this lawsuit serious and get mad at Apple.

josh b said:

Let me play devil’s advocate for a second…

The fact that it’s obvious loud volume will hurt your ears also works against Apple. Look at it this way…when it came time to design the ipod, apple 1) could easily decide how loud to allow it to go and 2) knew that over a certain decibel, the human ear is damaged.

So if you know, for certain, that over a certain decibel the human ear will be damaged, and you could easily limit the maximum decibels, why would you NOT do it? Certainly the designers came to this issue and make a conscious decision.

The McDonalds analogy doesn’t work. There’s nothing inherently bad about eating a fatty big mac. If I’m an athlete, or I only eat 1 meal a day, I can eat a big mac every day for 2 months and there will be no problem. On the other hand, Apple knew, without a doubt, that listening to the ipod over a certain volume will harm people.

So why allow the device to do something that they know will harm people when they could easily prevent it? And it’s not like adding a simple modification to the software would be expensive.

All I’m saying is that the issue isn’t as simple as many are making it sound. If people took the time to read a little bit more about how defective product law actually works, they would see it’s not as silly as the media often portrays.

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