iPhone Meltdown Update
1:42 am, April 20th, 2009, Nicole Martinelli

Here’s an update on the iPhone meltdown we wrote about awhile back. Tim Colbourne in Rome plugged in his iPhone 3G to his computer’s USB port and left it to charge. Three hours later, it caught fire. The above is an aftermath pic.
About two and a half weeks after his post, a replacement iPhone arrived. Holburne returned the flambè phone so that Apple’s engineers could pick it apart to figure out what happened.
On his blog, Colbourne notes:
“I won’t say it was the easiest process. Apple’s European headquarters in Ireland explained that ordinarily this would be classed as ‘accidental damage,’ and would not be under warranty. Apparently, iPhone fires are so rare that the company assumes that faulty parts are not to blame and that it must be in some way connected to user error…In my case I was lucky that the Apple engineers had seen the story, checked out the photo, and wanted to get their hands on the phone in return for a new one.
The takeaway here seems to be, yes, iPhone fires are perhaps a fluke but if anything happens to your iPhone or Apple product, blogging about it helps get some satisfaction – though Colbourne says his first post was just to see whether anyone else had encountered the same problem.
Via A Roman Thought
Posted by Nicole Martinelli in iPhone, iPhone 3G | Comment on this article
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good for you…that was kool of them to actually replace it
I had a nightmare happen with an iphone…my 17 year old sister begged and begged for an iphone and with my support my mother got her one for her birthday last October…then in January the upset hit…she had dropped it…and was hysterical, crying…
and I was like…well it can be fixed…at the time didn’t know how to but knew with my experience with taking apart and fixing Macs that it could be done…and since the warranty was void from it being broken…I ordered the digitizer on ebay…and foolishly used PDAparts.com’s YouTube video to replace it…well that was a big mistake…should have used iFixit.com’s instructions but I didn’t…and because it just said to use the case opener tool by where I had removed the screws from by the dock…well I pried it from the black back and the silver frame…instead of just lifting the glass out of the silver frame…and ended up tearing up the speaker, headset assembly and the wifi…and in turn broke the LCD too…and that was all she wrote because my sister hated me for sure…we were all in tears…and PDAparts.com didn’t want to take any responsibility for their erroneous directions…
well I said we can take a chance at our local Apple store (Boca Raton, FL)
they took pity on me for what I had done to the phone and was gracious enough to sell us a new one at the $199 price instead of the without a contract price
so there is so much good that comes from Apple…great products and amazing customer service…I plan to take my macbook back in to them because of the cracking top case…
scott, on April 23rd, 2009 at 10:26 pm