They say that those closest to you hurt you the most. One Alberta teenager has suffered third degree burns at the hands of something he spends a lot of time gazing at: his iPhone.
16-year old Josh Schulz was asleep in his basement bedroom when his charging iPhone 5S exploded. His mother woke to her son screaming downstairs. He suffered third degree burns to his right arm, right leg and other parts of his body.
Unsurprisingly, his mum Carol was pissed off about the pyro-phenomenon, telling the Hamilton Spectator: "It just makes us scared to plug in our phones. How many people plug their phones in before they go to bed? Everybody, so it is charged in the morning."
She's not wrong – I myself am one of those cavalier overnight chargers. Her son's iPhone reportedly got so hot that it exploded and caused £95,000 worth of damage, so the Schultzes are staying in a hotel until their house has been repaired.
Who is responsible? Poltergeists? The Illuminati? Tim Cook? Type "exploding iPhone" into Google like any researcher worth his salt and you'll see that this type of iPhone-on-fire-for-no-reason story is fairly common.
One New York man's iPhone exploded in his pocket while he was on the way to a wake. "My iPhone blew up," he said after spending ten days in a burns unit. Another case was recorded in China when a woman's iPhone blew up on a bus, leaving her with eye injuries. She says that she'd been on the phone for 40 minutes, before trying to end the call by tapping the screen. It was at this point that the device combusted.
Has your iPhone exploded your house or ruined your jeans? We'd love to hear from you.
