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iPhone Auto-Combusts On Australian Airplane
First time accepted submitter thegreymonkey writes "Last Friday, an iPhone caught fire on flight ZL319 operating from Lismore to Sydney. This incident is under investigation from Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA). This accident might be related to the iPhone battery again." Whether it "caught fire" may be a matter of semantics; as reported in the above linked story and by Network World (hat tip to reader alphadogg), though, the iPhone "started glowing red and emitting dense smoke."
Seems like Randall has predicted the future again!
If spending 30 seconds illustrating something which has been well-known for years to anyone with half a clue is "predicting the future", then yes, once again xkcd is at the forefront. Are you also impressed by the number of innovations in Apple products which have never been seen before?
The fact is that batteries in portable electronic devices have the potential to start fires if they fail in various unlikely ways. I don't know of any failure mode in a smartphone battery will explode with enough force to blow a hole in an aeroplane - any regulatory tests done by a window mock-up? Directly against the metal fuselage? But they're all sufficiently dangerous that there certainly needs to be the means to extinguish an electrical fire.
The lack of extra shielding on Apple unreplaceable batteries is going to make things a bit more interesting, but you knew that when you bought the product.