If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t dismantle your iphone or ipad to replace your battery or screen the reason is it’s for your own good.

For there is a potential danger lurking inside … its lithium-ion battery.

Apparently it’s not that rare for these batteries to catch fire when they are disturbed in this way.

Both the Washington Post and online website Cult of Mac - a daily news website that follows everything Apple – have revealed the problem.

Cult of Mac state: “Whenever a new iPhone or iPad is released Apple gets criticised for how hard it is to work on. Special tools are required and everything is glued together. Replacing your own screen or battery is nigh impossible.

“But it turns out the company is doing you a favour because iPhone repair is surprisingly dangerous.”

According to the Washington Post, companies that recycle electronic devices have to deal with frequent fires.

Cascade Asset Management, an eWaste recycling company, estimates that 1 in 3,000 of the devices it handles catch fire.  

The fires are caused by the lithium-ion batteries that are in virtually every gadget, including all the Apple products from MacBooks to AirPods.

The Washington Post states: “When crushed, punctured, ripped or dropped, lithium-ion batteries can produce what the industry euphemistically calls a ‘thermal event.’ It happens because these batteries short circuit when the super-thin separator between their positive and negative parts gets breached.”

Cult of Mac adds: “If it was easy to open an iPhone or iPad obviously people would do it. They’d buy screens and replace the ones they cracked. Or they’d put in new batteries. And 1 time out of every 3,000 someone did this, their iOS device would burst into flames. 

“Cascade’s technicians are highly trained and still have the electronic gadgets they’re working on catch fire. The odds of the lithium-ion battery exploding have to be much higher when the entire ‘training’ of the person poking around inside the device consists of watching most of a single YouTube video after skipping over the boring warnings about fire hazards.

“There would be news reports almost every day about someone setting their house on fire while working on an iPhone or iPad. There would be pictures of burn victims. Images of suddenly homeless kids crying in the cold. And people would blame Apple.”

To read more on this go to https://www.cultofmac.com/576751/iphone-repair-recycling-dangerous/

Or the Washington Post story at https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2ftechnology%2f2018%2f09%2f11%2fexplosive-problem-with-recycling-ipads-iphones-other-gadgets-they-literally-catch-fire%2f%3f&utm_term=.c2ad3d26d6e4

* More than 50 airline companies across the world – including some of the biggest and best-known - now carry AvSax fire containment bags to deal with fires in personal electronic devices caused by lithium-ion batteries that power them.

The bag – which won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise this year - has been used 27 times to deal with emergencies since the start of 2017.