[donio]

The Kindle and AirPod cases are not really comparable since those are relatively minor products for the respective companies.

On the Apple side the iPhone 4 antennagate is a better comparison since the equivalent fix there would have involved free replacements for a flagship and revenue-critical product which Apple did not offer.

Intel on the other hand did eventually offer free replacements for anybody who asked and took a major financial hit.

[wruza]

Antennagate didn’t affect everyone though, only those 90s businessman nokia-in-fist style holders.

Anecdata ofc, but everyone I know already held phones in fingers back then, rather than hugging it as a brick.

[donio]

Maybe but by that argument 99% of the affected Pentium users could have happily used their computers until they became obsolete. The bug went completely unnoticed for over a year with millions of units in use.

The media coverage and the fact that "computer can't divide" is something that the public could wrap their heads around is what made the recall unavoidable.

Intel's own marketing hype around the Pentium has played into it too. It would have been a smaller deal during the 486 era.

[scarface_74]

There were even (bad) jokes about it newspapers at the time.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-12-14-ls-8729-s...

> Why didn’t Intel call the Pentium the 586? Because they added 486 and 100 on the first Pentium and got 585.999983605 .”

[scarface_74]

And Apple sold the same GSM iPhone 4 without making any changes to it for 3 years and the uproar died down.

Before anyone well actually’s me, yes they did come out with a separate CDMA iPhone 4 for Verizon where they changed the antenna design