This is certainly a very scary incident! Many of us have the habit of charging our mobile phones when we sleep but please do remember to keep your phones further away should you choose to do so.
Based on a recent report by Eastday, a woman from Chengdu, China identified as Luo purchased a 64GB iPhone 8 Plus on February 27, 2018 from an official online retailer and was happily using her phone. However, she did have some issues with her new phone when she first started using it as she discovered that the device would get rather hot especially when she was charging it. Uh-oh!
She went online to check and found that this was actually a common problem that many other users faced so she thought nothing of it. On March 23, just less than a month of using her phone, Luo was going to sleep at around 5am and decided to charge her phone by her bed before she fell asleep.
Suddenly at around 12pm, her cat woke her up and when she looked at her charging iPhone, she was shocked to discover that her phone was emitting smoke! She quickly unplugged her gadget and switched off her phone but noticed that the smoking phone had already burnt a big area on her mattress. Imagine what would happen if her cat had not woken her up!
Luo inspected the damage further and found that the charging port on the iPhone 8 Plus, her cable and her mattress were all ruined. The burnt patch on her bed measured at least 40cm in length and 20cm in width. As her phone could not be switched on anymore, she decided to lodge a complaint with Apple’s customer service department on that day itself.
On April 1, she sent the damaged iPhone and the two original iPhone cables to Shanghai as requested by Apple because they needed to run some tests. However, they only got back to her one month later and said that the damage was caused by external heat sources.
“I asked them to explain what kind of heat sources they meant and the customer service officer hesitated before answering that it could be caused by hot weather or a hot desk. I was not smoking or using an electronic blanket near the phone but they concluded that this was not their fault and refused to compensate me,” she added.
Luo says that she cannot accept this explanation and said she only wants a replacement iPhone and compensation for her burnt mattress. On May 3, she received another call from an Apple staff who said that he would be handling the case. He told her that they will send the device and cables to the United States of America for another test but Luo says she is distrustful that Apple would take responsibility of this issue.
Oh dear! Hope the matter is cleared up as soon as possible!
Also read: Young Girl Sleeps While Charging Phone on Bed, Gets Electrocuted to Death