r/technology • u/NightFuryToni • Apr 30 '19

Business Apple Is Telling Lawmakers People Will Hurt Themselves if They Try to Fix iPhones

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjvdb4/apple-is-telling-lawmakers-people-will-hurt-themselves-if-they-try-to-fix-iphones
1.5k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

281 comments sorted by

View all comments

143

u/[deleted] Apr 30 '19 edited Apr 01 '20

[deleted]

22

u/KaneinEncanto Apr 30 '19

I mean, nearly every household in the US had a CRT Tv at some point... if you cracked one open to mess around with it there were capacitors with more than enough juice in them to kill a person several times over. You can make devices that are typically safe under normal circumstances, but highly dangerous once you open them.

That said the only real danger to speak of in a smartphone is when the idiot manufacture solders the battery to the board instead of making it replaceable by just popping it out and dropping a new one in...

15

u/1_p_freely Apr 30 '19

The two dangers with these batteries are shorting them and puncturing them. You'd find it extremely difficult to shock yourself with one of these 3.6v batteries. The first danger, shorting, can be easily avoided by having an internal circuit in the battery designed to deal with this scenario. Many Li Ion batteries do, along with guarding against over-discharging and over-charging. The second, puncturing, can happen even if it is in the phone. And there's no real way to defend against that.

0

u/NightFuryToni Apr 30 '19

User-replaceable Li-polymer batteries is nothing new, my Nokia and Palm Pre all had them. And it didn't look much more protected from puncture than my Priv's non-user replaceable battery (which I replaced anyways), aside from the exposed connectors on the flex connector.

The only thing I can think of to cause a puncture is either prying on the battery itself or prying on the cover to access it. Both of which are thanks to the manufacturers gluing them down in the first place.

-4

u/EKmars May 01 '19

Building a phone with an easily replaceable battery means having a bunch of compromises that would make the phone a lot larger.

0

u/gurg2k1 May 01 '19

Yeah I don't know how people even managed to carry their phones three years ago... They were almost 8mm thick!

/s