iPhone battery bursts into flames after man bites on it
Clearly, this is not a good way to verify if your battery is authentic or not.
An iPhone battery goes up in flames after a Chinese man bites on it.
Remember when we told you not to eat Tide Pods? Here's another one: Don't try to eat phone batteries either.
Last Friday, a man walked into an unspecified electronics shop in China, picked up an iPhone battery and bit into it, Chinese media reported Sunday. The battery blew up in his face, literally.
Footage of the incident, uploaded to Chinese video sharing service Miaopai on Saturday, gained almost five million views. While some Chinese internet users expressed concern for the man and a girl standing near him, others have questioned his intelligence, asking if he thought it might be gold and saying, "Are your teeth okay? Sometimes having a brain is a good thing!" One user claiming to have worked at Apple in the past added other examples observed, including a buyer sniffing a box and requesting the phone to be changed because it didn't smell like apples.
The news comes after Apple's recent confession that older iPhone models are debilitated by a battery update that intentionally slows performance. The company issued a formal apology and offered to replace batteries for users at a discounted price, but it hasn't stopped unhappy consumers from taking it to court for fraud.
It's not the first time we've heard of batteries heating up too much either, be it in phones, laptops, headphones, cars or other electronics. The most notable case in recent years is probably when Samsung had to recall its Galaxy Note 7 twice over two different problems that set the phone's battery into spontaneous combustion. And earlier this month, an iPhone that overheated and began to emit smoke sparked an evacuation at an Apple Store in Switzerland.
It's not known why the man decided to bite the battery, although Chinese media speculated that the man wanted to replace his iPhone battery and could have been trying to test its authenticity -- people bite on pure gold to verify if it's genuine as a practice in China. The bite could have caused a rupture in the battery casing, causing it to explode, according to the report, which added that no one was injured although people were shocked.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNET's request for a comment.
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