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'External force' fractured French iPhones, says Apple

Batteries not to blame

Apple has claimed that all of the iPhones it has examined which allegedly underwent sudden screen shatter did so because of pressure applied to the outside of the handset.

"The iPhones with broken glass that we have analysed to date show that in all cases the glass cracked due to an external force that was applied to the iPhone," the company said in a statement quoted by the BBC.

Almost a dozen cases of disintegrating iPhone displays have been reported this month, all in France. Today, a Belgian boy claimed his Apple handset went foom, too.

Unlike many handsets, the iPhone's screen is protected by a layer of glass rather than plastic, the better to prevent the scratches seen on iPods in the past.

In many instances, the handset's owner said the phone appeared to vibrate before the screen suddenly cracked. Some also claimed the glass splintered, in two cases allegedly leading to eye injury.

The explosive quality of these examples led many observers to suspect overheating lithium batteries, though the stories of shattering screens don't mention smoke or fire almost always seen when such power packs detonate.

Indeed, Apple said "there are no confirmed battery overheating incidents for iPhone 3GS", though it didn't mention previous models.

It insisted that "the number of reports we are investigating is in the single digits". ®

Latest Comments

Or maybe...

It's a new iPhone app. One of those useless ones. It simulates a broken screen. Unfortunately the makers added a message saying: "No press detected, press harder"

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Anonymous Coward

@Andus McCoatover

9 is nearly a dozen

9 is single digits

@Darius

You need to seek legal advice.

Sale of Goods act gives you a warranty against faults according to what a "reasonable person" would expect, regardless of any artificial (and usually mandated) warranty period provided by the manufacturer / reseller.

You would need to be able to demonstrate that a reasonable person would expect an expensive piece of consumer hardware to last more than 12 months and O2/Apple would equally have to demonstrate that offering only a 18 month contract minimum and 24 month contract as standard in no way implies that anyone should expect the phone to be fault free within that time.

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Conspiracy

It wouldn't be possible for (insert disputed number) of victims out of (insert disputed number) of iphone owners numbers worldwide to have no insurance after breaking their phone and think a free one from Apple due to a 'fault' could be a nice idea ? Just sayin'.

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The Glass

The iPhone undoubtedly uses one of the brands of glass designed for touch screens on mobile devices. This sort of glass is generally very thin, and hardened / tempered (those are the same thing.) The Tempering process does systematically pre-stress the glass, so that it can actually accept more strain before it cracks, but as soon as a small crack forms, it generally propagates at a high speed, since each end of a crack will provide both a massive stress concentration, and an outlet for the built in strain.

Tempered glass will actually bend a fair amount more than standard glass, plus it will take a much higher level of thermal stress, as would be applied under conditions of uneven heating. It wouldn't have a 'shattering temperature' so much as shatter due to having different temperatures applied to nearby volumes of glass. Theoretically a hot battery which applies heat to one side, while the other is exposed to air could cause failure, but I've got no idea whether the rest of the phone would be able to survive such conditions.

In any case, people should probably know what to expect when purchasing a pocketable device with a large, unprotected bit of glass on the front.

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@shawnfromnh

What are you thinking? Apple specifically chose glass because it was the most resilient to scratches, you know, something else you'd bitch about from your position of ignorance?

Let's face facts folks, the statistically insignificant number of reports of anything like this is unbelievably low. Now we add to the fact that it appears many of the issues were due to external force. It looks like this has been the huge overblown story of the summer that I thought it was all along. Nice FUD play by those who hate Apple, but there is no issue with the iPhone.

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