I was thinking about the ipad 3 because the games are better on iOS, but i’m thinking a good deal on a (used?) ipad2 might be a smarter choice for me, as well as any other serious mobile gamers.

I reckon I’ll wait six months so they can iron out this issue, at which point I still won’t buy one because I’m a laptop-lovin dinosaur.

People are not thinking this through and failing to understand what the issue with the heat is.  If it is 120 outside the case how hot is the chip getting?  How many heating and cooling cycles out of spec until it bricks?

So you think it was done by the leading consumer-rights-supporting organization, who was running a scam to falsely subscribe people to their magazine?  And not done, say, by one of those people who goes around selling magazine subscriptions for  fundraising/profit who could have pulled your name from a phonebook, or whatever to meet quota?

If the device is operating outside of its specified temperature range, isn’t that something that a consumer might want to know?

The much bigger issue, imo, is that the thing won’t charge while you’re gaming:

“We also noticed that the new iPad wasn’t charging while the game was running and it was plugged in. In fact, the battery continued to drain. It charged normally, however, when we weren’t running a game.”

That seems like kind of a deal-breaker if they’re marketing the thing as a gaming platform.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2009/08/12/exploding_iphone/

http://today-technos.blogspot.com/2008/08/exploding-ipod-nano.html

http://news.cnet.com/apple-sued-over-exploding-ipod-touch/

Not everyone rejected the NDA’s… but Apple has a history of stonewalling

https://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/apple-lawyers-tried-to-hush-up-exploding-ipod-reports/4984

* sigh *

I’ve had to research safe temperature limits and test products to ensure they don’t exceed them.    We used published data on rodents and humans.  There isn’t a perfect answer, but time and temperature both affect tissue damage.   I forget the exact numbers, but 50 C was the threshold we tried to stay under (prolong exposure could kill skin).  60 C was when you had to keep exposures very short.

There is some old research on mice by German doctors around 1948.  We suspected it was very accurate.  And not actually done in 1948 or on mice.

I’ve used ipads for extended periods when the room temperature is over 40c with no issues. While I understand that I’m using it outside the intended specifications (outdoors in summer), I can verify that they certainly don’t shut down at those temperatures as claimed.

Operating temperature: 32° to 95° F

It violates its own operating range! But how can operations occur when operations can’t occur?  It’s iPads all the way down, man…

Of course, that’s kind of silly. In my world we have system requirements reviews with the customer before the system is designed, and that really doesn’t translate with consumer products. I wonder, though, whether it would really help Apple’s interest to release their test procedure. Probably not. Reasonable or not, people would find it wanting.

So knowing the temperature of a device like an iPad is definitely a valid question (47 C is close to condition we’re talking about), especially a graphically intense one with apparently little room to shed its heat. You don’t want your 12 year old ending up with permanently discolored skin from playing on their iPad all day.

Yeah, big problem here.

(note, I have not trusted Consumer Reports since they fraudulently subscribed me to their magazine in the mid 90s and don’t provide a contact phone number on their bills and I own an iPad 3rd generation so I may have bias)