Thai man reportedly dies clutching his scorched iPhone 4S

Re: It's all about the money

"Unfortunately this will keep happening whilst Apple are charging £15 for a cable when I can buy 2 off eBay for 99p. 30 cables for the price of one is a no brainer."

Except maybe when the money-saving merchandise comes with the risk of death - unless one actually gets a thrill from living dangerously. Would you pay the extra money for the sake of, let's say, staying alive?

Even when they are selling poorly manufactured adapters at the lowest imaginable prices, there is NO excuse for any company to peddle goods with potentially lethal defects.

Re: It's all about the money

Don't Apple don't supply a charging cable when you buy an Iphone ?

Re: It's all about the money

This will keep happening while people buy crappy black-market chargers rather than just cheaper alternates (i.e. properly CE-marked unofficial chargers), and have houses without RCD's or decent fuses, and don't check their cable before they plug it into the wall.

Fair enough, you could get a zap off a dodgy charger, but electrocution? That shouldn't happen unless you are somehow part of a circuit to ground and there's no RCD / ELCB at all. It's possible that with a fuse you might get a nasty shock but it should only be very temporary with a proper, compliant, modern fusebox.

This is little to do with crappy chargers, and much more to do with crappy house electrics AND crappy chargers combined.

And he was on a cement floor - so what the hell was forming the circuiting? The DC cable into the phone shouldn't even be able to carry that sort of power enough to actually electrocute you before melting / blowing an internal fuse and how the hell did it manage to arc from the AC to the DC side of the transformer?

Fact is, if he'd had anywhere near decent electrics, he could have stuck his fingers into light sockets and still not died (Fact: Have seen this done any number of times, including once in a lecture hall - maths lecture, so completely unrelated - where people were told they wouldn't do X so would they just stick their finger in a light-socket? Some idiot volunteered and did it in front of us all while the lecturer ummed and arred about whether to actually let him try it. And I know electricians who work with live sockets as a matter of course).

Must have been one hell of a heated conversation.

Was

Was he in the shower like the last one?

Re: It's all about the money

It's not the cable it's the charger.

Doubt anyone is going to get scorched using a genuine Apple charger even with a fake cable - that 5v at around 2a max is not likely to be fatal. These are when obviously mains voltages are being allowed to pass to the cable - so again IT'S THE CHARGER NOT THE CABLE.

Re: It's all about the money

You must be pretty rough with your cables - I have original Apple cables that sit in my backpack, get used every day and folded / unfolded repeatedly - I've not had one fail. It's not to say they could not - accidents happen and there are physical limits to anything like this.

Re: It's all about the money

The Apple parts have been tested and approved under CE and other regulatory schemes required to sell products in the EU and US. The cheapo parts will be unsafe and therefore cheap and nasty.

Re: It's all about the money

There is no point in saving money at the risk of losing your or a loved one's life.

Majority of the charges from reputable companies go through a variety of safety tests as not to kill or injure a person. There is a cost involved and the customer pays either with their life by taking a chance or buy paying more to have a safe charger.

Mandating the dogfooding of their own charger designs—for example, by using each until an internal component (diode, resistor, heart, etc.) fails—would likely have a salutary effect on what's produced in pursuit of the quick buck made off the backs of the cheap and the not-so-swift. You buy cheap, you get cheap—and you encourage cheap to enter the marketplace.

@Voland's right hand (Re: The wonders of having a metal phone body)

So his death was a direct result of product design choice. Lucky for Apple this didn't happen in the USA.

Anyone remember the Ford Pinto?

Re: The wonders of having a metal phone body

As the charger is only designed to deliver a few volts, and almost any plug you think of has the zero/earth on the outer shell of the plug, a metal casing should be perfectly safe. An old-fashioned charger with transformer would insulate the low voltage circuit completely from mains, and is therefore the safer option. However, with copper prices the way they are, and the weight and bulk of a transformer, most supplies are now switching power supplies, in which there is a potential conductive path from mains to low voltage. Properly designed, there should be fail-safes that should prevent accidents happening. In cheap replacements, these can apparently fail. So while I can understand why phone designers can get metal casings approved, a plastic case would provide an extra fail-safe. Not buying dodgy chargers is another.