A high school student had her iPod explode on her desk yesterday and luckily not a single student was injured. This is not the first time we’ve heard of exploding iPods or iPhones but this particular case seems to be a little different so don’t be so quick to blame Apple. Gizmodo points out that another student has told the true story.

“The iPod did not just explode. It was broken so a kid took the entire thing apart and was rubbing wires against the battery, which became very hot, then exploded. This is not a faulty product that caused a danger to people. This was bored kids, in a classroom with a substitute all week, who found a dangerous way to entertain themselves.”

Moral of the story, if you don’t know what you are doing and it can be dangerous… don’t do it!

[Via Gizmodo via Newburyport Daily News]

Exploding iPhones have been a very popular topic as of late, but now an alleged tier 2 iPhone support agent has contacted Gizmodo to further back up Apple’s claims that the exploding iPhones are not the result of faulty batteries but rather simply cases of user abuse.

I’m a Tier 2 iPhone agent for Apple. I’d like to add that roughly one to two calls out of every thousand that I take deal with the battery “overheating”. Generally, this incident can be described as “uncomfortably warm”, and I have not ever received or heard of a coworker receiving a call about someone being injured by the iPhone, including people too stupid to stop using their phones after the screen is broken.

The email later goes on to say Apple gets tens of thousands of calls and zero of them have proven to be safety issues. From the beginning of this debacle we’ve had a feeling that this was simply the media blowing this way out of proportion. We still get this feeling…

Does this alleged tech support email put some of your minds to rest regarding the “exploding” iPhones?

[Via Gizmodo]

Apple has finished their investigation in the case of the exploding iPhones/Pods and the results are not shocking – the battery malfunction theory has been rejected. It was first rumored that defective batteries were more than likely the cause of the devices going boom but as it turns out, excess force was the reason – according to Apple.

“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.”

With 26 million iPhones and 200 million iPods sold to date, Apple claims there are zero confirmed battery overheating incidents for iPhone 3GS and the number of reports of overheating they have investigated are in the single digits.

So are you buying what Apple is selling? Could these isolated incidents actually be due to excessive force in every case or could there still be something up with those batteries? What do you think?

[Via Mac Daily News}

Numerous press reports are claiming that iPhones and iPods are “exploding” — well, three isolated devices, at least so far. Apple is said to be investigating these reports and have no answers as of now.

“These are isolated incidents and… there is not a general problem, For the cases which have been reported in the media, Apple [is] trying to get more information on the details of the incidents and will do tests as necessary to investigate the possible cause.”

It was last August that we reported on the iPod fires that were taking place. Three recent claims in the past few months have sparked this new investigation:

• we had a teenager in France who claims his girlfriend’s iPhone blew up and sent glass flying
• an 11 year old girl who claimed her iPod “made a hissing noise and went pop”
• and on August 2, a Dutch man who claimed his iPhone 3G went up in flames and burned his car seat.

Thankfully no one was injured in any of the above incidents. With the millions of iPods and iPhones sold to date and only a very few being proven “faulty” this is nothing you should be too concerned about. In fact US Consumer Product Safety Commission claims that a total of 15 Apple devices since 2001 have been recorded as faulty, while none included any serious injury.

[Via Ars Technica]