Roger Fingas
Apple's Amsterdam store was briefly evacuated on Sunday afternoon following what appears to the overheating of an iPad battery.
After trouble began store staff immediately put the tablet in a bin with sand, which seemed to halt the situation, Dutch blog iCulture noted. By around 2:20 p.m. local time, the city's fire department was on the scene. Though there was no obvious smoke, three people reported respiratory issues.
The incident moved quickly enough that by 3 p.m., workers and shoppers were allowed to come back in.
While normally safe, lithium-ion batteries are still volatile — they can potentially explode or catch fire if something like leakage isn't dealt with immediately. This year alone Apple stores have seen multiple battery incidents, including some fires.
This may be related to Apple's discounted replacements, instituted to placate people upset about the company throttling iPhones with weakened batteries. While the company has since made it possible to toggle throttling, people with older iPhones have been flooding Apple stores looking to get battery replacements before they return to $79 from their current $29. More foot traffic may mean a higher likelihood of discovering faults.
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13 Comments
Every company has batteries that overheat. But just watch the rabid haters attack Apple. Sad.
AppleInsider said:
Not really seeing the connection here. There’s a few unwarranted assumptions here that are not supported by the original Dutch article. The article doesn’t even mention who the iPad belonged to.
These batteries obviously have a certain failure rate like all mechanical, electrical, and active chemical products. I assume the failure rate follows the bathtub curve, suffering higher failure rates very early on (infant mortality) and late in the lifetime due to wear out. During the majority of the useful lifetime unprovoked failure rates are probably very low.
Like anything based on probability you can still see clusters of failures that viewed in a narrow scope seem to defy the probabilistic expectations. Case in point, two weeks ago both my iPod 6 and iPhone 6 experienced battery bloat causing the screen to pop off. This occurred on two consecutive days! The iPhone battery was still at 97% after nearly 4 years of use and never experienced any battery issues.
Apple replaced both devices. The iPod was still under Apple Care so it cost me nothing for the new iPod. Apple charged me $29 for the replacement iPhone 6 Plus, which was probably fair. What was mildly disappointing was that I did catch the Genius Bar tech checking with the Apple Store supervisor to inquire whether to charge me for the iPhone replacement, so I assume they have discretion to waive the fee for battery failures. Despite the fact that I’ve bankrolled at least one genius’ kids college tuition with my purchases at the Apple Store over the years - and it was the same day Apple broke the 1 trillion market cap, no fee waiver for me. I guess Apple Store tech support supervisors don’t understand customer lifetime value (LTV).