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Australian Vodafone Store Evacuated After Demo iPad 'Explosion'
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REALLY??!!! WOW! Is it true, are you all actually one-eyed scabrous leperous hunchbacks????
Customer bought knockoff charger somewhere. Comes into the store. Swaps charger on the iPad with his knockoff charger. Walks away with a genuine charger.
And from then on, Vodafone is using a knockoff charger, without knowing.
Reportedly, many people are using knockoff chargers in some parts of the world because the seller opened the box, swapped expensive Apple parts with cheap replacements to sell the Apple parts separately, then seals the box. Customer pays for genuine parts and gets fakes.
So, when you see lightning coming at you, you turn and run away?
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This is the problem with news people. The bold line is at the bottom of the original story. Is that Jerry Springer running that company?
That's exactly what happened to me years ago with a cell phonein America. I bought a Verizon Motorola phone in 2004 from what I thought was Verizon, but was really "CC's". A month later the battery stopped holding a charge. I took it to a (real) Verizon Wireless store (it happened to be easier to get to), where they said they couldn't replace the battery because it wasn't a real Motorola battery. When I told them where I bought it, they shook their head and informed me that CC's does that sort of thing. Someone at CC's had opened the box, swapped the genuine battery for a knock-off, and resealed the box.
DISCLAIMER: This happened in 2004, the CC's where this occurred is no longer there, and it is only my one-time experience. For all I know, a single employee stole one Motorola battery for his own phone, and it never happened again.
Um...so what? NO iPads should explode. Ever. It's that simple.
Unless they are being tampered with or incorrectly used, of course.
Doesnt need to be knockoff chargers, could of been a 3rd party charger from a big company but they still dont meet the quality standards of the Apple ones.
Forget what charger was used... how can a iPad "detonate" under ANY circumstances involving electric current?
I mean maybe if you ran lightening-strength current through it it might explode, but then anything would. A block of wood would explode with enough current. How can that much current come out of a wall?
I mean maybe if you ran lightening-strength current through it it might explode, but then anything would. A block of wood would explode with enough current. How can that much current come out of a wall?
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It wouldn't have been the electricity, directly, that caused the explosion--it would have been catastrophic failure of the lithium-based battery pack. Lithium-ion or Lithium-polymer batteries can undergo an extremely violent reaction if they fail. It's one of the reasons all that fancy self-monitoring technology is built into Li-ion/LiPo battery packs--over-charging (or over-discharging) them can be bad.
Here's a video of what happens when they fail:
http://youtu.be/z3o_2mwRPdw
The video is made by a company that apparently makes bags for remote control car enthusiasts to contain the explosion/fire; apparently RC battery packs don't usually have the same sort of overcharge protection computer battery packs do (to save cost, maybe?) so it's a more common issue than with computer batteries. This can also happen if the battery is physically punctured.
When we do charge testing on Li-ion batteries at the lab I work at, we put them in a ceramic cup in case the charge controller fails and they go boom.
If this story is to be taken at face value, that's probably what happened to the iPad. Why is another matter--it could have been an extremely rare, catastrophic failure of the charge controller, it could have been on a REALLY bad charger that hugely overloaded the built-in protection and overcharged the battery, or it could have been physically damaged by having a screw put through it or something.
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They're only dangerous if you mess with them. A hair dryer and a shower are two ordinary household appliances. But everyone knows that bringing a hair dryer in a shower would electrocute them. People should know not to use 3rd party chargers also.
There are hundreds of thousands of people that work for Samsung. What's so unbelievable about one posting here and why would anyone care if you don't believe them?
Had planned a trip to the Apple store today; feel better now.
..or maybe not?
