I could swear apple has had issuses with their phones as well
They have, but not anything like what happened with the Note 7. That was a whole new level of incompetence and stupidity unprecedented in the wireless industry.
Nope. A modern Lithium Ion battery has a normal failure rate of about 1 in 12-15 million per year, where you might get some over heating. That's an acceptable failure rate and expected. Samsung's PR department tried desperately to find and promote the very few reports of iPhones that did in fact overheat into a similar "Issue" as the problem they were having with their Galaxy Note 8.
However, the failure rate of their note 8, after less than two months on the market, was approaching 1 in 2500, with only 1.5 million sold into the hands of users and 3 million shipped into the sales channels. Calculating out that rate, it worked out to a failure rate that indicated they'd all fail in two years.
Samsung later reported they had determined that the manufacturing of the battery compressed the layers too strongly, in an attempt to increase the capacity by adding more layers in a small space, and the batteries swelled under Samsung's rapid charging technology. After an undetermined number of rapid charges, the barriers between the lamina in the batteries failed and arcing would occur resulting in overheating, fire, and sometimes explosive failures.