http://www.apple.com/support/ac-wallplug-adapter/
Apple has determined that, in very rare cases, the two prong Apple AC wall plug adapters designed for use in Continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Argentina and Brazil may break and create a risk of electrical shock if touched. These wall plug adapters shipped from 2003 to 2015 with Mac and certain iOS devices, and were also included in the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit.
Customer safety is always Apple's top priority, and we have voluntarily decided to exchange affected wall plug adapters with a new, redesigned adapter, free of charge. We encourage customers to exchange any affected parts using the process below.
Note: Other wall plug adapters, including those designed for Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States and Apple USB power adapters are not affected by this program.
Just to be clear: it's not
power adapters they're recalling, it's the
plug adapters (commonly called "duck heads"). In any case, they're doing the right thing. I've actually never heard of one of these failing, but knowing Apple, they probably got one or two reports and decided to play it safe. (When I worked for the fruit company in retail, if a customer claimed
anything to do with sparks, smoke, or fire, the item would be replaced on the spot without argument, knowing full well that many of those cases were fraudulent, essentially harmless DC cord shield fraying caused by obvious customer abuse.)
Today its their power supplies, yesterday it was the antenna, the day before that the magsafe connector, the day before that the power supplies, the day before that the video cards, the day before that the hinges, etc.
Again, this is not a power supply recall. This recall covers plug adapters that plug into power supplies. And remember that the main reason you don't hear about Dell, HP, etc recalling stuff is a) because the media doesn't consider it newsworthy so they don't report on it, and b) because they don't recall until it becomes urgent, whereas with anything remotely safety related, Apple recalls aggressively.
How many fake ones will come out of the woodwork?
I'm actually not aware of widespread cloning of the duckheads. But do you remember how a couple of years ago, after a few reports of cellphone users being killed by cheap Chinese USB chargers that fed 230V to the user's head, Apple did a voluntary exchange program
for third-party chargers, letting you bring in your no-name charger and get a genuine Apple one in exchange?
That is a company that cares about its customers.
They are polarizing and a proof that you can't please some people no matter what you do. Apple has caught a lot of slack for working conditions of people building their products in China (even though every other consumer elec. company having the same or worse issues), so they released the Mac Pro which is made in the US, but you only ever hear about how expensive it is.
Here they are doing the right thing, but people will always find ulterior motives to bash them with.
Quite right. The Apple bashers are people who truly don't understand
why Apple is successful (hint: it's not religion or kool-aid or stupid lemming customers or marketing or cosmetics), and the fact that Apple is successful (even though their brains are telling them it should be failing horribly) makes them angry. Very angry, because they don't understand it.
And of course, the cognitive dissonance is shocking. The "Apple is expensive" generalization refuses to die, even though it is demonstrably untrue. I've had people tell me to my face that a $900 Apple product is more expensive than a $1000 Samsung with essentially identical specs. I guess the price is not what defines expense.
(But it's not ROI, since that's something where Macs have been superior to PCs since time immemorial.) When I got my Mac Pro back in 2008, I decided to price out a Dell with as close specs as possible. The Mac Pro being a Xeon workstation, the comparable Dell was a Dimension workstation. The Dell ended up more than $1100 more expensive, and with slightly lower specs (slower FSB) other than a larger HDD. (I will gladly concede that Apple's configure-to-order prices for RAM and storage are excessive; I always upgraded those myself.) In fact, Apple's price for the whole Mac Pro computer was about the same as the Newegg price for just the two Xeon CPUs it contained!