Dev's iPhone cable melts after iOS 5 upgrade
'I am the Lord of Hellfire, and I bring you...'
An iDevice software developer has claimed his iPhone 4's USB cable "caught fire" after he installed iOS 5 on the device.
Florida-based coder Gus Pinto, whose Twitter profile has his occupation as "pioneering Mac desktop virtualisation", Tweeted today: "My charging cable caught on fire while charging my iPhone 4 running iOS5."
He included a piccy of the outcome:
Source: Gus Pinto
Pinto has had iOS 5 on his iPhone for at least nine days, so it's not like the thing suddenly went up in smoke after right after the upgrade.
That said, Pinto himself said "I've been complaining my iPhone has been way too hot since I upgraded to iOS5".
It's something we've noticed too. The longer you need to charge the phone, the hotter it gets, though we've not experienced a meltdown like Pinto did.
It's not a new issue, either. iPhone users have bemoaned high phone temperatures in the past - and have reported singed cables, too.
No wonder Apple is researching alternative methods of charging up the infernal handset's battery... ®
COMMENTS
Maybe...
Maybe St Jobs has found a new way of getting iFanz to upgrade to the next iPhone... Force their existing model to recycle itself into a lump of carbon! Obviously this went off early, no doubt due to Apple's inability to handle clocks.
re: Try setting the clock on those to 03:14:08 19/01/2038
Oh NOs, my phone is only going to work correctly for another 26 years!
BTW, that's what is know as the UNIX millennium bug. Feel free to post a smug comment in 2038 on a website of your choosing... Assuming you can find a website still working!
so...
that's what happens when you plug your iPhone into a Firewire port.
Cheap cable carrying high current...
In my experience, Apple's cables are junk - I've had one DC-cable melt-down on a laptop PSU, one near-miss on another laptop (I went to pick it up, and burned my fingers).
The cheap stranded tin/copper cable used in these is brittle and not adequately protected from mechanical strain. The result is that when the strands break from flexing, there's not enough connected cable left to carry the required current.
I'd recommend a workalike from Belkin ( # F8Z328EA ) or any other competent cable maker, rather than shelling out £25 for another fire hazard from Apple.
Something in iOS5 may be provoking this (maybe a faster battery-charging regime), but the root cause is penny-pinching by Apple.
