French regulators on Tuesday ordered Apple to halt sales of the iPhone 12 for emitting too much electromagnetic radiation, and to fix existing handsets.
French regulators on Tuesday ordered Apple to halt sales of the iPhone 12 for emitting too much electromagnetic radiation, and to fix existing handsets.
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.