French regulators on Tuesday ordered Apple to halt sales of the iPhone 12 for emitting too much electromagnetic radiation, and to fix existing handsets.
Calling it radiation gives the layman an implication that it’s dangerous i.e. ionizing radiation. This is electromagnetic radiation, just radio waves.
You don’t need iodine, this isn’t going to give you radiation sickness, but it is a little surprising.
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/radiation/
Bananaphones will give you ionizing radiation
That doesn’t change the fact that it’s not outputting ionizing radiation. It doesn’t change the fact that the phone would literally have to be emitting hundreds of watts in order to begin having a noticable affect on its surroundings. I cannot fathom that the iPhone is legitimately able to output any level of ionizing radiation as you’d probably need physical chips designed to do that (or have a phone made out of uranium).
Most em radiation is literally harmless. Visible light is a form of em radiation. So are radiowaves and infrared. It’s all photons. The reason why some kinds of em radiation are dangerous is because the photons can damage physical matter. Here’s an image showing where the different EM bands are and what they correspond to:
Anything above visible light (UV and higher) is ionizing and dangerous to public health. Anything in the visible spectrum and below is only harmful when emitted at a high enough quantity to blind or literally cook something. It’s only UV and above in which the photons have enough energy to damage physical matter.
Most em radiation is literally harmless
Sorry but that’s just not true. All radiation is harmful at high enough levels for prolonged periods of time. Sunlight, for example, will literally burn you in minutes if you’re near the equator and don’t have a tan.
Microwaves operate at about the same frequency as cell phones and at a thousand watts or more they will turn your blood into gas with just seconds of exposure. That would be a very very painful way to die.
The government has officially defined a power level that phones are allowed to output, and iPhones are outputting more than that. So they need to fix it. Immediately.
Holy cow…
To explain something, because this keeps going around, they’re conflating ionizing EM radiation with electromagnetic radiation in general. Electromagnetic radiation of the kind emitted by cellphones is basically harmless. You’d have to be outputting a significant amount of energy for it to have any harm because the photons emitted don’t have enough energy to actually damage physical matter. The dangerous kind (ionizing em radiation) is only UV and above. Radiowaves, microwaves, infrared and visible light are all pretty harmless unless you’re outputting enough to literally cook food.
Here’s an image showing where the different wavelengths are:
If there’s a recall of all older iPhones, what would happen? Would they send everyone the latest? (Honestly they should if it’s really that serious)
As far as I know, the last proper phone recall was when Samsung’s battery production line was regularly producing batteries with a bent piece of metal that could short things out and burn down your home while you were asleep, possibly killing you (luckily it was recalled before that happened to anyone).
In other words, far more dangerous than this.
Samsung spent $17 billion on the recall and was able to collect 96% of the devices within a few months (they continued collecting more after that). As far as I know, they literally had a list of every serial number that had ever come off the production line, and they did everything they could to find each and every one of those devices and get it back.
Some of the measures they used were pretty extreme, including sending staff to major airports around the world, asking everyone to show their phone before boarding, and confiscating the phone on the spot if it was one of the affected models.
A fire on a plane is obviously even worse than a fire in your house… if the fire happened over the ocean the pilot might be forced to crash land in the ocean so everyone can get out of the plane. If the fire happened over land… the pilot might struggle to find anywhere close enough to crash land safely. People could die from smoke inhalation/etc before they could ground the plane.
They also issued a mandatory software update, to all of the phones, which crippled charging on the phone. You could still charge the phone but not well. Supposedly this improved the safety somewhat. Less energy in the battery means it’s less likely to kill someone.
Customers were compensated - but some people said not adequately.
Even if they did (they won’t), they can pry my mini out of my hot, irradiated hands.
I think the best we could hope for is a simple firmware update, assuming enough of the right people make noise about it. I’m sure Apple would much rather we all just bought new phones though, so they won’t do anything unless they have to.
Would the mini be included since it’s released with the next year’s models?
All versions of the 12?
“radiation” levels are barely outside of regulation. and france has record of testing devices more strictly than the rest of countries. my guess is Apple will appeal, it will be retested and all will be good. the same has happened before (I think 7,8 and 11, but don’t quote me on it)
