MRI disabled every iOS device in facility

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9mk2o7/mri_disabled_every_ios_device_in_facility/

by rootsu • 4 years ago

19 13 4 years ago

old.reddit.com

How can you be sure your phone stays helium-tight if you are allowed to change the battery yourself?

simion314• 4 years ago

Right to Repair does not ask that any user can do the repair or change the batteries, they ask that competent users and third party repair shops can do it. So if an Apple hyper genius can do it there is no law of nature that makes it impossible for a competent non Apple genius to also do it.

If this is not enough I suggest they put more glue on the sensitive to Helium areas, I heard Apple glue is magic.

raxxorraxor2• 4 years ago

The criticism isn't just directed at Apple to be fair, but I think it is apparent that vendors don't want users to do any of that. This thinking is prevalent in many industries and it was just meant as a jab towards users that defend such practices with ridiculous excuses.

Sure, it would be users that need to demand it and they do not. So they get less capable products in the end.

tkanarsky2• 4 years ago

You virtually cannot. Short of potting the phone in a slab of epoxy, or welding every seam, helium will find a way to sneak through any rubber gasket, O-ring, etc that seals a phone, even straight from the factory.

jleyank2• 4 years ago

It’s going to be expensive to resolve. How far from the mri were the disabled devices, and was there reasonable airflow to those locations? Thinking about it, there was an emi spike starting things up (missing brass?), there’s a lot of magnetic field (things like pens and keys can go mobile) and the aforementioned helium leak. Sensitive antennas and the like won’t like the emi or magnetism, and if there are also components sensitive to He…

I once screwed with a tube colour tv using a magnet and the colours were distorted in that area of the screen until I unplugged the tv and left it for a few days. Induced currents from the magnetic field or changes in the electric or magnetic fields might not be all that good for devices that run on milliamperes or less.

And somebody has to pony up a bunch of iOS devices and some He to run blind controlled experiments. I suspect that “operating in an area that could pull fillings out of teeth” voids their warranty.

tkanarsky2• 4 years ago

Magnetic field strength falls off with inverse square, so it shouldn't be an issue outside of the immediate MRI room. The helium risk to MEMS oscillators is real -- a former employer had an incident involving gaseous helium venting and a dozen bricked iPhones and watches.

jleyank2• 4 years ago

How far did the helium have to travel to damage the devices? Did they recover after some time?

karteum• 4 years ago

"It doesn't surprise me that a massive, powerful, super-conducting electromagnet is capable of doing this. What surprises me is that it is only effecting Apple products"

May I suggest an hypothesis (I would be happy to hear from other people whether this might make sense. I didn't see this possibility mentioned by anyone on the Reddit page) : of course Apple is very secretive about their implementation details, yet as far as I know they are the only consumer brand who implemented Ultra Wide Band at large scale (in a quite innovative way, they can be praised for that !). See https://developer.apple.com/nearby-interaction/

I suspect that UWB implies having an RF receiver and antenna which are "wide open" in terms of frequency selectivity, which means that in the event of a strong RF pulse in the spurious domain, more energy might enter in the device compared to other brands. Maybe that's an explanation why Apple devices (and only those) were burned by an EMP ?

mikestew• 4 years ago

Maybe that's an explanation why Apple devices (and only those) were burned by an EMP ?

It was helium that disabled the phones, not an EMP. On top of the fact that this occurred, AFAICT, before Apple was putting Ultra Wideband into phones (iPhone 11 was the first, 2019).

SilasX• 4 years ago

Yeah I had remembered this issue coming up on HN and found this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18340693

leetbulb• 4 years ago

Relevant video (2018, Applied Science) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvzWaVvB908

loonster• 4 years ago

This really needs a year tag and a explanation of the cause.

Spoiler: Helium leak.

kurupt213• 4 years ago

We are constantly venting helium into the lab where I work… it hasn’t killed any iPhones as far as I know.

MRI disabled every iOS device in facility

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