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Apple Blames 'External Forces' For Exploding iPhones
Shome writes "Apple has stated that there is no evidence that recent iPhone explosions reported by users are connected to overheating of batteries.
It may be stated that French consumer affairs authorities have started their own investigation on the reported explosions, some of which have caused minor injuries to the users, and are studying the phone's safety features.
The Inquirer runs a piece that blames Apple for blaming its customers. 'This mysterious force is not God, or a rival religion, nor does it require any metaphysics to understand. An "external force" is just Apple's term for the black shirted people who believe that everything that Apple makes is wonderful. It is what other companies call their "customers," writes Nick Farrell.'"
check out the Macrumors forums. people bought iMacs a few years ago and LCD's started to go after the warranty expired. The Genius's called the customers crazy. Only reason Apple payed out money with the nvidia chipsets is because they got the money from nvidia.
there was a hard drive clicking issue with current MBP's and 7200rpm drives, including freeze ups. people took them to Apple stores and were told it was a feature.
Sometimes it is the customer's fault.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Sure, it may be "external forces" like accidently dropped phones, high- or low humidities or temperatures, or what-not, but if the iPhone explosion rate is higher than competitive phones, you have to ask yourself why iPhones are so fragile.
Come on Apple, find the cause and unless it's customers deliberately abusing their phones, fix it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
..because Apple doesnt have a track record for selling devices that explode. They certainly didn't recall 1.8 million iBook and POwerBook batteries in 2006. Definately not.
"His name was James Damore."
And I would like to blame the Inquirer for blaming Apple for blaming the customers.
Still plenty of blame to go around...
Of course you shouldn't expect it not to break. But an explosion? That's unacceptable.
An "external force" is just Apple's term for the black shirted people who believe that everything that Apple makes is wonderful. It is what other companies call their 'customers'." writes Nick Farrell.'
No, an "external force" is an end user putting the device in an oven at 350 degrees, or driving a nail through the battery.
Both are actions that no manufacturer should be held responsible short of specifically stating one can do such a thing when you can't.
"External forces" do exist, no matter how much you hate one company or another.
While I wouldn't trust Apples own investigation into which end of the spectrum the problem lies, just because you hate Apple does not mean that other end of the spectrum does not exist.
I am not making any claims to which end of things the exploding batteries from Apple falls under. I would tend to suspect only a very small percentage of complaints are from end users abusing their products, and most likely the batteries actually are failing under normal use, but I have no more data to go on than anyone else.
But to claim that it is not physically possible for an end user to abuse their device, and state that 100% of all such failures can not be the cause of anything other than Apple, is just stupid and dishonest.
Of course this is an Apple story, so I will just sit back and wait for the Troll mods and accusations of 'blaming users' or 'defending Apple' or some other crap I haven't done...
Turns out the battery is susceptible to exposition to Reality Distortion Fields in excess of 750 milliJobs
There's an app for that! Seriously though, lithium polymer batteries *can't* explode since they have no metal canister to hold the outgassing pressure. They simply 'vent with flame'.
I keep my iPhone in my back pocket. It's not directly under me, taking my full weight, but I am partially sitting on it. So far no explosions. Also today I am wearing a black shirt. Though, I'd like to say in my defense that I don't always wear black shirts.
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For apple products, when the mantra is "It just works" ... and the software is built on a very small number of in-house designed products, it shouldn't be the customer's fault.
Take windows (or linux) - if you can't get something to work correctly, or the wrong drivers/settings fry your hard drive from parking the head incorrectly (or whatever), then you can blame the customer. But when apple designs the product, from start to finish, it should very rarely be the customer's fault, especially when in normal usage.
Normal usage, you ask? In my world, normal usage means occasionally (very infrequently) leaving a laptop on inside a case, and expecting it *not* to fry because of poor thermal design. It also involves getting the occasional splash of liquid on my gadgets. And, you know, keeping my phone in my pants, where it will heat up if it isn't designed properly.
Normal usage is *not* exploding batteries, exceptionally short lived LCDs or GPUs that don't live long unless the fan is on full speed, all the time. And when these thing occur, I expect (and have always received) good support from my hardware vendor.
And no, I do not buy apple. Sure, they have great warranty service... if you buy the applecare. But I can get that sort of extended warranty from almost any vendor - The difference? Those vendors don't have retail locations like apple.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
...for being a complete dick. Not everyone who owns an Apple product is a black-shirted zealot, and it's obnoxious to paint all of a company's customers with such a broad brush. Nick is just feeding the trolls by echoing the same stupid tropes that unoriginal people endlessly repeat in forums and comment sections all over the web.
A decent writer - editorial or otherwise - should discuss the merits and facts of the situation without bringing in useless and alienating invective. He may get a few yuks from the dumb crowd and incite a colorful flame war in the comment section, but he certainly won't gain any deep or lasting respect as a journalist. But I suppose this is just a temporary thing until he gets a job he actually cares about or finishes that sci-fi novel he's been working on.
Oh, now look, I'm doing it too. Dammit!
-- thinkyhead software and media
I know little about these specific explosions, but modern high-density batteries pack a heckuva lotta energy into a tiny package. If mechanical damage causes an electrical cell-short, you can expect that energy release to be pretty dramatic. If not an explosion, certainly a rapid heat discharge. That's tough to design around unless you just make the thing bigger and heavier to withstand the pressures exerted by the worst-case ass-press.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Have you see the pics? These phones have severely cracked screens, but 90% of the glass is still there... This is not exactly an "explosion" though the imact in a few cases caused the LiIon battery pack to outgas or "pop"
In every case reviewed thus far however, "external pressure" clearly indicated the force was a twisting or bending, or an impact on the glass itself pushing in. The glass is not boken outwards, so any glass discharged from the device, per the evidence presented, was likely shot up from the impact with ground, or a couple of kids were wrestling over the device and bent it in such a was to send glass shards outward.
NO evidence of the battery, or the glass itself, being a fault has been shown in any of these cases. Though little is public information, Apple has libberously documented each suspected case for a device returned to them for examination, and it;s consistant evidence.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Precisely.
I wonder what explanation Apple's engineers have for the laptops that spontaneously smoked & sizzled? I think it's clear the flaw lies in the Lithium battery not the user, and Apple should simply SAY that rather than deny it. Like so: "Dell recently started it's corporate blog called dellone2one.com. One of posts is dedicated to Dell's infamous "flaming notebook" from Osaka. Dell thinks that it was a fault in a lithium ion battery cell, which caused laptop to burn.
"Dell's engineering teams are working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and a third-party failure analysis lab to determine the root cause of this failure and to ensure we take all appropriate measures to help prevent a recurrence", says post. LINK: http://laptoping.com/wp-content/flaming_laptop.jpg LINK: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/sony-beancounters-tremble-as-own-vaio-batteries-come-home-to-roost-208031.php LINK: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/gizmodo-reader-witnesses-ibm-laptop-catch-fire-at-lax-201115.php
I'm glad all my laptops use NiMH, since it's been around quite a big longer (almost 20 years) and the bugs have been removed. I'm sure Lithium batteries will be a great product to own... circa 2020.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Hello, nice to meet you! I think I've met your friend before, but I don't quite...Mr. Strawman, is it?
Lawnmowers cut things, hands included. Coffee is hot, and it can sear skin just like any other kind of hot water. Reasonable people expect these things. Reasonable people should not expect that their phone, which is designed to be placed next to the head to make phone calls, could explode if the screen cracks. A reasonable person might expect some kind of danger to the person using the phone if one had, say, run the phone over with a car, and if that's what these people were doing then maybe they got what one would expect. But if it was caused by a minor shock or a particularly heavy guy sitting on it, the design of the phone should not be such that it would explode.
Apple has libberously documented each suspected case...
Spell Different
From everything I've read, these 'explosions' (and I use that term generously) are the result of the iphone battery being shorted or in extreme cases, ruptured. I've never heard of a case of explosions because someone 'sat' on their iphone. Considering the millions of phones out there and the ease at which such 'sitting' test could be reproduced by ANY person with an iPhone I would have to take that with a grain of salt.
Current good theories are that the battery itself gets short circuited since the iPhone is not designed with a user replaceable battery, it doesn't contain the usual shielding around the battery like a normal cell phone does. As a result, an extreme enough break in the casing that impacts the battery can cause it to let the magic smoke out.
Your pink ballgown is at the dry cleaners?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm glad all my laptops use NiMH, since it's been around quite a big longer (almost 20 years) and the bugs have been removed. I'm sure Lithium batteries will be a great product to own... circa 2020.
Naaaaaah. The main thing that limits the short circuit current of a battery is it's internal resistance. And different battery families have considerably different resistances. Check out the mighty wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_resistance
The lower the internal resistance, the higher the overall battery efficiency, especially at high currents, but the more dangerous a short circuit is.
So, as alot of automotive mechanics and UPS repairmen know, short out a lead acid cell, and you get a "glowing crowbar/screwdriver of doom".
As the R/C airplane guys know, short out a NiCad and it'll pop, quite violently. My father had a RC plane pack pepper a styrofoam ceiling with foil fragments in the 80s during fast charging (no one hurt, no serious property damage, but that was the end of that pack...)
wikipedia's mostly made up numbers show a lithium has about 1/2 the internal resistance of a NiMH. So, that would be twice the short circuit current. Thanks to P=I2R that would be four times the heat output. Lithiums have a much higher energy density, meaning the lithium either has more energy to convert into heat, or that its an equal amount of heat in a smaller volume.
I'd conservatively estimate a shorted Lithium will inherently make a bang thats about ten times bigger than the bang from a shorted NiMH. Plus or minus engineering design effects, like corroded emergency vents in a NiMH, flamability and boiling points of the different electrolytes, etc. This would make a highly entertaining mythbusters episode.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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What you say is generally well known among the technical crowd. LiIon batteries are powerful and have contain dangerous potential. Apple engineers probably know this too.
Here's the deal though. This is a consumer device called a phone. People expect to be able to treat it and deal with it just like all of their other phones. There are no warnings that the phone should treat their iPhones with extra care or that the consequences of mistreatment are exploding devices and potential injury. This would be the bare minimum we should expect as consumers.
But LiIon batteries have failed and erupted into flame and explosion for longer than the iPhone or other iPod devices have existed. Not all of them are the result of physical damage -- some simply happen spontaneously and are likely due to very small defects in the batteries themselves.
And I will agree that it is probably VERY hard to make an iPhone with a LiIon battery keeping it slim and all that without these risks. But what should a company do under those circumstances? Make it anyway and hope for the best??? Nope! Don't sell it!! Keep in mind, these are devices that are also routinely in the pockets of children. All the warning labels if they were to exist would not prevent a child from turning his phone into a grenade with or without "external forces" acting upon it.
Even if all of these instances were the result of user mishandling, it still doesn't excuse Apple for putting these on the market. They should all be recalled until a solution for safety is created and dispatched.