Apple Trying to Permanently Resolve iPhone 6 and 7 Battery Defects
Apple Trying to Permanently Resolve iPhone 6 and 7 Battery Defects:- The message on Twitter had the ominous overtones of recent Samsung problems, when Twitter user Bree posted a video of her swollen and blistered iPhone 7 Plus with smoke seeping out around the edges.
This wasn’t the first time that an iPhone 7 fire had been reported, but this was the first video of the incident to show up on social media. Previously, scattered reports of burning and exploding iPhone 7 devices had been reported, but none seemed to have public evidence.
As you might expect, the viral nature of the Twitter posting caught Apple’s attention. The company replaced the iPhone and collected the burned one to investigate. The incident happened on Feb. 22, so at this point, Apple hasn’t had time to do a full investigation.
But that wasn’t the only incident of an iPhone 7 catching fire. Last fall, an Australian surfing instructor reported that his iPhone had caught on fire and destroyed his car. Last September, a report on Reddit indicated that an iPhone 7 caught fire while being shipped to a customer
Older iPhones are also having issues, although they’re a little less dramatic. iPhone 6 and 6 Plus phones have had an ongoing problem of the battery power suddenly dropping to zero even when it had been fully charged a few minutes prior to the event. After several months of investigation, Apple released a software fix in the form of iOS 10.2.1, which according to Apple, solved about 80 percent of the problems.
The source of these incidents appears to be related to safety circuitry that was intended to keep iPhone 6 batteries from overheating and burning. The sudden drop in power was related to a routine in iOS that was supposed to sense when there was a problem with the battery and then turn the phone off to protect it. The problem in this case was that the software reacted even in the absence of a battery fault.
Both of the iPhones with battery problems seem to be rooted in the Lithium-Ion batteries that power them. When a battery is damaged, causing internal separators to be breached, the battery can discharge suddenly, causing significant heat and frequently even an explosion. The iPhone battery fire in September appeared to be the result of damage while the phone was being shipped, causing a fire.
The cause of the other two iPhone 7 battery fires hasn’t been determined. But in the case of the iPhone belonging to Bree, the phone was simply sitting on a table when it spontaneously caught fire.
The iPhone 6 didn’t suffer from fires, but it did suffer from Apple's well-meaning efforts to prevent fires. The preventive measure that cut power to iPhones when sensors indicated batteries were overheating was to blame. This feature did seem to prevent fires, but at the expense of being annoying and preventing use of the phone until corrective measures were taken.
The iPhone 6 battery problems are not related to what’s been called “Touch disease” in which the screen goes blank with a flashing gray bar at the top of the screen. That was caused by slight bending of the iPhone 6 case that broke electrical contacts.
The real issue with the iPhone battery problems has to do with the amount of energy that the phone’s battery is being asked to store. Batteries inside modern smartphones, which are only the size and thickness of a few playing cards, can hold as much as 4500 milliamp hours of energy.
This arrangement concentrates a lot of energy in a small package. Even a small fault inside the battery can cause a massive discharge of electricity resulting in smoke and flames at least. In the case of the Samsung Galaxy Note7, it led to explosions.
This problem with Lithium-ion batteries isn’t new and it’s not restricted to smartphones. Over the past several months online video viewers have been treated to sights of the spectacular ignitions of e-cigarettes or smokers dancing frantically when e-cigarette batteries blew up in their pants pockets. Last year it was the sights of burning hover boards.
But the problems with these batteries go back much farther. A decade ago images of burning laptop computers titillated users on the internet.
It would be wrong to who place the entire blame on Apple for this round of battery problems. While the company could have been more responsive to the iPhone 6 problem, nobody was hurt as a result and the company fixed the problem eventually. In the case of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus battery fires, the number of incidents is vanishingly small and are only known now because of the lurid video of burning iPhones on the internet.
The lesson here is that it’s a mistake to make Lithium-ion batteries with anything but safety being the primary criterion. Ironically, Apple was trying to maximize safety measures in the iPhone 6.
But the real answer is to engineer battery technology that combines lots of storage in a safer configuration. Such batteries exist in the trial stage now as I saw at CES in January. It shouldn’t be too long before those safer batteries make their way into devices, at which point we can breathe a little easier.
Source:- http://www.eweek.com/mobile/apple-trying-to-permanently-resolve-iphone-6-and-7-battery-defects-2.html
