French regulators on Tuesday ordered Apple to halt sales of the iPhone 12 for emitting too much electromagnetic radiation, and to fix existing handsets.
It’s not about health risks, it’s about interference. They will probably fix it with a firmware patch.
I believe they did in fact merely ask Apple to do that
Calling it radiation gives the layman an implication that it’s dangerous i.e. ionizing radiation. This is electromagnetic radiation, just radio waves.
You don’t need iodine, this isn’t going to give you radiation sickness, but it is a little surprising.
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That doesn’t change the fact that it’s not outputting ionizing radiation. It doesn’t change the fact that the phone would literally have to be emitting hundreds of watts in order to begin having a noticable affect on its surroundings. I cannot fathom that the iPhone is legitimately able to output any level of ionizing radiation as you’d probably need physical chips designed to do that (or have a phone made out of uranium).
Most em radiation is literally harmless. Visible light is a form of em radiation. So are radiowaves and infrared. It’s all photons. The reason why some kinds of em radiation are dangerous is because the photons can damage physical matter. Here’s an image showing where the different EM bands are and what they correspond to:
Anything above visible light (UV and higher) is ionizing and dangerous to public health. Anything in the visible spectrum and below is only harmful when emitted at a high enough quantity to blind or literally cook something. It’s only UV and above in which the photons have enough energy to damage physical matter.
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Sorry, I missed the point of your reply. I’ve seen a lot of knee-jerking and I knee-jerked myself. My apologies.
“Just radio waves” is what a microwave oven uses to explode eggs, or a laser to cut through metal.
It’s none of those in this case, and the amount of radiation is nowhere near, but still… radio waves are not all that innocuous.
Radiation, as in nuclear decay, is also a catch-all that includes ionizing radiation, alpha, and beta particles.
I blame the guy who invented radium cream for all the confusion.
“radiation” levels are barely outside of regulation. and france has record of testing devices more strictly than the rest of countries. my guess is Apple will appeal, it will be retested and all will be good. the same has happened before (I think 7,8 and 11, but don’t quote me on it)
If there’s a recall of all older iPhones, what would happen? Would they send everyone the latest? (Honestly they should if it’s really that serious)
Even if they did (they won’t), they can pry my mini out of my hot, irradiated hands.
I think the best we could hope for is a simple firmware update, assuming enough of the right people make noise about it. I’m sure Apple would much rather we all just bought new phones though, so they won’t do anything unless they have to.
France have nerfed old Apple products before.
My second gen iPod got volume nerfed back in the day because it was playing too loud for French regulations (with the earbuds that came with).
I’m probably one of the few that noticed because I was using a studio headset that required all that output power to play at a decent level.
Would the mini be included since it’s released with the next year’s models?
what do you mean? mini was released alongside all other iPhone 12s
I swear minis line releases were different times than the regular models for each generation, though it looks like 12 and 13 minis were the same time as the other models of their generation. So I’m going to chalk this up as I don’t know what I’m talking about haha
I believe you’re confusing it with the SE.
Also, there was a late color release for the 13 mini, IIRC.
Holy cow…
To explain something, because this keeps going around, they’re conflating ionizing EM radiation with electromagnetic radiation in general. Electromagnetic radiation of the kind emitted by cellphones is basically harmless. You’d have to be outputting a significant amount of energy for it to have any harm because the photons emitted don’t have enough energy to actually damage physical matter. The dangerous kind (ionizing em radiation) is only UV and above. Radiowaves, microwaves, infrared and visible light are all pretty harmless unless you’re outputting enough to literally cook food.
Here’s an image showing where the different wavelengths are:
