Apple Refuses to Repair iPhone That Shattered in the Cold

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Posted January 13, 2011 at 1:49pm by iClarified

Apple is refusing to repair a Norweigen iPhone owner's device after it shattered due to the cold.

Maybe this is all apocryphal, but a woman in Norway, while wandering in the icy wastes of the frozen North in minus 14-degree weather, picked up her iPhone only to find it had shattered in the cold. She took the phone back to the Apple Store and the geniuses refused to repair it, citing that the phone is not designed to withstand temperatures below freezing or above 35 degrees Celsius.

If Apple sells the iPhone in a country that has an average temperature below zero for several months of the year, do they really expect people not to use their phones?

Read More [via CrunchGear]

Apple Refuses to Repair iPhone That Shattered in the Cold

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Comments (13)

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Tommy - May 10, 2012 at 8:40am

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MarkL - January 15, 2011 at 7:30pm

-14? is this a joke? I've been using it anywhere from -10 to -35 this winter and not a single problem. going from +21 inside my house to -35 inside my car makes no difference. I obviously haven't used it for long outside in these temperatures because with -35 it takes seconds for your fingers to freeze & the screen stops being responsive after a couple of minutes. I call this FAKE. she must have dropped it.

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fskhalsa - January 14, 2011 at 6:37pm

I'll point out one thing: everyone is commenting about whether the iPhone's glass can really crack or not at low temperatures, but no one has thought to mention that this could be due to a manufacturing defect. Even if all normal iPhone glass won't crack, perhaps hers had some sort of unusual defect, such as improper tempering, or a bubble of something inside. It happens every now and then, especially when you're producing such large quantities of the part. As Apple's warranty is clearly supposed to cover manufacturing defects, I think they should be willing to repair this. Also, as I noted in a comment above, that image is not from this incident, so don't judge the situation based on that - it is simply a generic image of a cracked iPhone (you can find it in google image search).

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DigiHead - January 13, 2011 at 6:21pm

SO thing is - I'm repairing iphones, i mean professionally, so i have spare parts, i took one iphone 4 back and from a room temperature dropped it into freezer (-22C). nothing happened. I took it out - nothing happened. I heated it up around +50C and dropped it on ice again - guess what - still fine! She's bullshitting - you can clearly see it's been dropped!

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fskhalsa - January 14, 2011 at 6:30pm

In addition to what the other guy is saying, I repair iPhones too, and a lot of the repair parts you can get are listed as OEM, but they are really made by third parties, and are typically made from slightly different materials than the original Apple parts. That could be a factor in you returning different results in your tests. On another topic, I've seen that picture on the internet for a while, it's just a random picture of a cracked iPhone, not an image of this specific incident.

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DigiHead - January 17, 2011 at 9:26am

i was using original back back removed from iphone. so anyway this is very high grade glass and it's not breaking that easy from a temperature change

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Mr.D - January 13, 2011 at 5:34pm

She obviously dropped it or something. There is no way the starfire glass would crack from cold, unless he put ithe phone in some nitrogen.

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Salx - January 13, 2011 at 3:16pm

The story is this(i'm from norway): she sent from her house which was warm into her cold car which was below zero celcius, when she used the iPhone as a GPS in the car while waiting for a red light turn green she heard a loud crack and the glass on the back of the phone shattered.

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505error - January 13, 2011 at 3:11pm

And so glassgate begins...

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Dan - January 13, 2011 at 2:24pm

How about the lady pull down her tail and pay the $214 for a new one. If she claims that it cracked on its own than perhaps she can demonstrate it to all of us how cold weather cracks thick glass. I came from a country where we had -30 and none of the glass on our house ever cracked "on it's own" Don't lie to Apple employees and perhaps they would of repaired it but when you lie - no success story

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Tony - January 13, 2011 at 2:16pm

I've camped in below zero weather and used my phone. Glass is fine, just don't drop it on solid ice or step on it at all. Besides it won't just break on it's own. Must be more to story than we read.

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MG - January 13, 2011 at 2:04pm

The non-operating temp goes as low as -20. Since the glass on the back doesn't even do any operating, does it really matter if the phone was on or off? Surely it would have broken either way and -14 is clearly warmer than -20. They should just suck it up and repair it. She didn't do anything wrong unless she's been storing the thing in a snowbank.

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dt - January 13, 2011 at 2:20pm

I am in a Nordic country and it is just as cold. I call BS. If her phone was in a pocket or under a layer of clothing then it wouldn't have shattered. She dropped it and wants someone else to pay for her mistake. I dropped mine, went to Apple and they replaced it. Said it was a warranty repair, but I was sit ready to pay.

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