Apple Facing Lawsuit After AirPods Allegedly Ruptured Child's Eardrums With Amber Alert

[jimbobb24]

In short, the guys quoting 165dB are simpletons who think there is only one number.

If you told them it takes 4,000N to break a bone, they would buy that number and apply to it a newborn, child, or grandmother.

"How could the baby be hurt by a drop? It takes 4,000N to break bones!"

The dB scale is logarithmic. So when someone says the AirPods produces sound at 110 and the volume needed is 165 you are suggesting the difference in energy to break eardrums is not a linear 55 but 5 orders of magnitude difference. Thats just...not even conceivable biologically.

To use your example its suggesting that it takes 5000 newtons is silly because its a range of 4000-6000 but with db your suggesting its a range of 0-5000000 newtons. Its...not remotely consistent with biology.

 

[jimbobb24]

That is just wrong, there have been over a thousand kids saved, what are you talking about?
Source: https://amberalert.ojp.gov/statistics

Let’s Get Rid of the AMBER Alert System. It Doesn’t Work.

Crime is Slate’s crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

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Almost all kids recovered have been family members taking them and violating court orders or something like that. I said no child has been saved after being taken by a stranger. However I might be wrong...there may be a few which have been saved over 20 years of the system. The system was designed to prevent kidnapped children. But it doesn't. It just stops moms from taking kids on a vacation when it was dads turn to have the kids that weekend.

 

[AdamNC]

Sound pressure is not a physical force in the way many think. It's a level of sound waves moving at a certain sound frequencies at a certain speed at each and every frequency. Low frequency does physical damage to the ear. High does damage in a nerve sensory level. Mid range does the damage that cause "secondary hearing." Been to a concert and heard it still in your head hours later? There you go. A single high tone can not do both. Think about going to a concert. They purposely lower both high and low for that very reason. Most concerts you hear mid range the loudest. Yes a childs ear dum is more sensitive and "weaker." But takes incredible force by the speaker in terms of excursion and wattage to reach levels capable to do that damage. Example DB drag racing. (Car stereo loudness comps.) To reach with a single 10 inch speaker 140 db takes 10,000 watts.) When I was a judge for IASCA we tested levels of all frequencies of tweeters, mids, and well every speaker possible. Small speakers simply can not reach that level of a large woofer with lots of power. Your stock car stereo will never go above 112db. There is no way possible for a ear bud to put out anything near that. It would melt the coil well before that. OH before you say thats your opinion. No that was my job. Sound engineer for 15 years. Judging car stereo comps for 4 years, I have friends who own sound studios, run concerts, and I took classes in audiology. What i have seen by kids and adults and my own son is likely the case here... kids are rather than putting the earbuds away are sticking the long end into their ears to hold them when not in use. One wrong fall you have that shaft go through your ear drum and do serious damage to the inner ear.

 

[0924487]

Here’s the fix
View attachment 2006141

I cannot find this in Canadian region.

 

[0924487]

The sound level required to cause that type of damage is beyond what AirPods are capable off.

Quick Google search, and several sources state that 155-165 dB is what is required to burst the eardrum.

For adults or for children?

 

[scottinlexky]

this is what happens when society allows children to walk around with this crap in their ears all day and night. Pathetic how tuned out society is. Kids don't pay attention in parking lots on their phones, ear buds in..no situational awareness at all.

 

[Tagbert]

I am a bit surprised these earbuds have enough power to do that kind of damage in a single “blast”. Even at full volume, it is unpleasant but far from blowing up the ear.

Yes, that does seem somewhere between surprising and unbelievable

 

[Tagbert]

Wrong.

It's pretend doctors like you that spread misinformation.

Children have smaller ear canals. Smaller ear canals means greater sound pressure.

Do you seriously think an infant and adult can both withstand the same amount of dB?

But is the limit for a child within the Db range that AirPods can produce? We don't really know what happened here and the original description sounds... dramatized.

 

[Clix Pix]

Nobody seems to have noticed that the kid was listening with the AirPods on HIS iPhone.... Why would a 12-year-old kid even need any sort of alerts on his own phone, anyway? He's not going to be doing much in the way of anything useful in helping to find a missing child somewhere four or five states away from where he lives, anyway, or even in his own state. Why weren't Amber Alerts turned off on his iPhone right from the get-go?

 

[Robert.Walter]

That's the average; however, as I stated earlier, there has to be more to this story. AirPods do not have the power requirements to reach even close to that.

That’s my point. Somebody has to be an outlier on any standard distribution.

When the individual with the thin ear drums meets a max blast out of an audio device, the pressure threshold to do damage may be significantly below the norm.

 

[Robert.Walter]

I guess I just don't understand why this hasn't happened to someone 5+ years ago when(ever) they introduced those features. Billions of pockets and millions of AirPods back in 2016 or so. Why did it take this long?

Perfect storms happen rarely but the do happen.

It’s like anything, a series of necessary conditions have to line up before any disaster occurs.

The rarity of some of the conditions militate against event frequency thus its rarity. (In an FMEA, Engineers take frequency of a condition into account as a way to help prioritize mitigating with problematic issues; risk estimators do similar with ideas about things like100 year floods, etc.)

Look up the Swiss Cheese Hypothesis for a nice explanation of this concept.

 

[iGeneo]

Here's another potential suit opportunity to jump on

Kingsville toddler orders 30+ cheeseburgers while mom isn't looking

"My son was playing with my phone, I thought he was taking pictures," said Kingsville resident Kelsey Burkhalter Golden, after finding out what her son had done.

www.wfaa.com

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

I have Amber Alerts turned off. They're obnoxious and I work at home so I'm unlikely to see anything anyway.

Even so, I got this alert earlier this year. It was an alert describing the Joker from Batman here in Missouri. I kid you not. It was a test gone wrong.

View attachment 2006148

Missouri highway patrol blasts out 'Batman' cell phone alert by mistake | CNN

The Joker is not on the rampage in Missouri, but it looks like authorities there are ready for the “Batman” villain.

www.cnn.com

I don't have much trust in the system, lol.

Add the "system" to Apple's tragically poor software quality control, and funnily enough, you have a problem.

 

[jonnyb098]

Those Amber alerts are irresponsible on how loud they are.
I was driving and both mine and my wife’s phones started screaming.
Almost made a car crash.

Idiotic mentality to put these at maximum. Why?????

Put a normal volume and a notification that will be persistent until dismissed.
No need to scream.

I actually hope more people will send to court mobile providers and governments for stupidly loud notifications.

Attempting to save one life while putting thousands of others at risk of losing theirs. MAKES PERFECT SENSE….like everything else government does!

 

[jonnyb098]

Here's another potential suit opportunity to jump on

Kingsville toddler orders 30+ cheeseburgers while mom isn't looking

"My son was playing with my phone, I thought he was taking pictures," said Kingsville resident Kelsey Burkhalter Golden, after finding out what her son had done.

www.wfaa.com

Can parents actually be parents? So sick of the digital babysitters. And frightened of what garbage its already doing to kids. TikTok is mind rot for kids, plain and simple.

 

[manofthematch]

This story can't be true. AirPods are not capable of producing such a damage. Sth. else must have damaged the eardrum.

 

[HiRez]

Limiting the volume of alerts does seem reasonable. They're right in your ear already, there's no reason for them to be loud. This lawsuit, I dunno, it sounds fishy, but loud alert sounds can be super annoying, especially if you are listening to a podcast that is mixed to a low level, causing you to have to turn up the volume.

 

[deevey]

Privileged applications such as Amber Alerts might be able to drive them louder than audio applications. Similar to how the iPhone and Apple Watch screens have a higher potential peak brightness than it seems - Wallet on iPhone and the flashlight on the Watch are allowed to push the brightness higher than normal.

Even driving extremely loud headphones with an external amplifier would blow the headphone drivers within seconds at the kind of levels required for a normal person to sustain hearing damage.

I just cant see how Airpods have the capacity to do this much damage in a couple of seconds without also damaging the headphones unless there was an underlying condition or hearing damage already caused by playing them loud.

 

[deevey]

Let’s Get Rid of the AMBER Alert System. It Doesn’t Work.

Crime is Slate’s crime blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @slatecrime.

slate.com

Almost all kids recovered have been family members taking them and violating court orders or something like that. I said no child has been saved after being taken by a stranger. However I might be wrong...there may be a few which have been saved over 20 years of the system. The system was designed to prevent kidnapped children. But it doesn't. It just stops moms from taking kids on a vacation when it was dads turn to have the kids that weekend.

Theres more alerts than just amber alerts that are equally as loud, e.g. typhoon warnings, earthquakes etc...and any of them could have caused the alleged damage, it just happened that it was an amber alert in this case.

 

[erikkfi]

I'm sure the rationale for the absurdly loud volume of these alerts is "we want to make sure it doesn't go unnoticed", but it's counterproductive, because how many people have outright disabled them because of this problem? Having a "quiet" option would be better than simply on or off.

The alerts have the sonic urgency of a nearby active shooter situation, but the content of "watch out for this license plate."

 

[JPack]

The dB scale is logarithmic. So when someone says the AirPods produces sound at 110 and the volume needed is 165 you are suggesting the difference in energy to break eardrums is not a linear 55 but 5 orders of magnitude difference. Thats just...not even conceivable biologically.

To use your example its suggesting that it takes 5000 newtons is silly because its a range of 4000-6000 but with db your suggesting its a range of 0-5000000 newtons. Its...not remotely consistent with biology.

A children's ear can be 20dB greater than an adult's due to the shorter and narrower ear canal.

Your response doesn't even consider how we got to the 165 dB number in the first place. It's an estimate only. There hasn't been some WW2 Mengele-style large scale study on rupturing the eardrums of adults, much less children.

Stand back and use some first principles thinking before saying it's "not consistent" with biology.

 

[ProVideo]

The TV and Radio alerts here are just as, if not more, annoying. Whoever reads the Amber Alert here sounds like they are in a nuclear bunker talking through a microphone from 1932 transmitted through a broken McDonalds drive thru box. I'm too busy trying to find the off or volume button to comprehend anything they are trying to say.

Also, the EAS tone on TV and Radio should be reserved for actual disasters that put the lives of hundreds or thousands of people at risk. Otherwise it just becomes a regular occurrence to ignore. Similar to car alarms, 99.9% of the time it's an accidental or broken alarm and I don't even look out the window if I hear one at this point. I wonder how many people have heard the EAS tone for an impending tornado and slept through it because they are so accustomed to it being an Amber Alert.

 

[JPack]

But is the limit for a child within the Db range that AirPods can produce? We don't really know what happened here and the original description sounds... dramatized.

The claim of ruptured eardrums seems entirely plausible given what we know.

The same sound source for a child can add 20 dB just due to the shape and size of the ear canal.

It's silly for someone to claim 165 dB as the threshold as if we were testing the strength of a piece of metal. That 165 dB figure is an estimated number from indirect research and studies on animals. Can a person or child be more sensitive than others? Of course.

No one should post a number and simply dismiss a claim. We're not machines.

 

[hans1972]

If I turn off Amber alerts, how am I going to know what is going on in Chevy Chase canyon?

So he also has a canyon named after him...

 

[grjj]

To burst an ear drum requires over 165db. I call absolute BS on this story. Parents just trying to make a buck.

The noise intensity to rupture an eardrum would have to be very loud, usually 165 decibels or more. This would correspond to the sound intensity of a gunshot at close range, fireworks or extremely loud music. Although the eardrum will heal, damage to the inner ear is often permeant.

THIS. At 100db, hearing damage is _possible_ in a few minutes. "damage" meaning reduced capacity to hear certain frequencies or tinnitus. Physical damage to the midd/inner ear requires massive amounts of sound power that are simply not possible from such a small battery powered device.
IF, and that is a big if, happened there was certainly some anatomical defect in the kid's ear to begin with.