Once in a while, we hear scary stories of iPhone catching fire, iPhone exploding while charging, or an iPhone that went POP! All of us ignore such news for three main reasons:
- It happens rarely
- Generally it happens due to owner’s fault
- There’s hardly any damage done
But what if there occurred a case where it wasn’t the owner’s fault and the damage was pretty severe? Well, that’s exactly what happened with Gareth Clear in Australia.
36 years old Mr. Clear is a resident of New South Wales. He was mountain biking when the incident occurred. While riding his bike near Manly Dam, he slipped and fell down. He got back onto his bike and started pedalling again, brushing aside the incident as nothing more than a lapse in balance.
He’d hardly ridden a few meters before he noticed that there was smoke coming out of his back pocket. It was the same pocket in which he’d kept his barely 6 months old iPhone 6. Within seconds he heard an explosion and felt a burning sensation on his inner thigh.
The iPhone had exploded, burning through two layers of cloth and skin!
He sustained second-degree burns and had to undergo a skin graft surgery.
Later investigation found that when he slipped from his bike, he fell exactly on his phone in his back pocket. The impact had shattered the battery casing and caused the lithium-ion battery to explode.
Mr. Clear was very clear (sorry, couldn’t resist the joke!) that he is not going to sue Apple. He said that he understands this was only a case of bad luck and that Apple was in no way responsible for the mishap. He clarified his position to the Daily Telegraph, saying, “It was a one in one million chance I hit a part of the phone which pierced the lithium battery and it exploded.”
However, Apple has assured him that they’ll look into the matter.
Incidents such as these, while very rare in occurrence, have a tendency to be peculiarly shocking. They remind us of how much we rely on a technology that is prone to going horribly wrong. From a tiny toaster in your kitchen to the gargantuan Airbus A380 flying in the skies, every “electrical appliance” is a potential threat, and we’d do well to be cautious while using them.