Apple tech support staff urged to keep quiet about iPhone 12 radiation problem – Bloomberg
This week, the French government asked Apple to stop selling the iPhone 12, as tests showed that the level of radio radiation on the devices was too high.
The company was given two weeks to resolve the issue by updating the software.
Meanwhile, Apple, as reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, has instructed its technical support specialists in the country not to provide any information to customers if they ask about the problem. Employees should also decline requests to return or exchange smartphones if they were not purchased within the last two weeks (Apple’s normal return policy). And if customers ask “is the phone safe,” tech support should answer that Apple products “undergo rigorous testing to make sure they are safe.”
Apple denies these claims and says it will work with France to prove that the iPhone 12 meets the requirements. The company provided government officials with test results from its own and third-party laboratories to demonstrate that the product was within the acceptable range.
At the time of the problem, Apple had already discontinued the iPhone 12. The model debuted in 2020, but millions of people still own such smartphones. According to Counterpoint Research, Apple sold more than 100 million of these devices in the first seven months of sales.
A few days after France’s announcement, other European Union countries, including Belgium and Germany, began assessing the radiation levels of the iPhone 12.
As you know, smartphones, just like laptops and microwaves, emit electromagnetic radiation during operation. And despite the fact that there is no evidence to date that phone use can cause cancer, countries clearly define the permissible SAR (Specific absorption rate), or specific absorption rate of electromagnetic radiation.
If the SAR level of a particular device is higher than the norm, it is not certified by the regulator. At the same time, the actual level of radiation from smartphones in some cases was repeatedly found to be higher during subsequent tests. In particular, in 2019, Chicago Tribune journalists measured the level of electromagnetic radiation in Apple iPhone 8, iPhone 7, Galaxy S8, Galaxy S9, Galaxy J3, and several other models as part of an experiment.
The full report contains 100 pages and the most interesting results were shown by the iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy S8 – Apple’s smartphone had 4.5 times the maximum permissible level of radio emissions, while the radio emission coefficient of the Samsung model exceeded the norm by 5 times. The study was conducted at a “pocket” distance of 2 mm, while Apple, for example, conducts tests at a distance of 5 mm (although at this distance the results were higher than the company’s figures).
It is also worth mentioning that in 2021, the Ministry of Health of Ukraine approved a 10-fold increase in the electromagnetic radiation standard, from 10 μW/cm² to 100 μW/cm² (which, in particular, was supposed to improve the quality of mobile communications and high-speed Internet).
