Yes, current is the killer, as our residential RS Electrical Engineering team has pointed out. In fact, the lower the current, the more damaging it is if it travels through your heart. It is better to have a high current immediately stop your heart than to have a small current cause your heart to go into fibrillation.

TBH, there is definitely more to it than just the 5V charger being the culprit. I talk on my phone while its charger for as long as I've owned a cell phone and I'm not dead. Yet.

More like Apple wants to gather as much evidence as possible for the inevitable multi-million dollar lawsuit that's going to be brought against them, even though Apple already knows the chance of their iPhone/charger causing her death is astronomical.

I'm pretty sure I was shocked while charging my phone last month in Korea.. I was using a standard USB cable but charging it with the old PC that was in the hotel room... My phone has charge contacts on the side for a cradle charger, and when I touched it I got zapped. It wasn't painful, but definitely... shocking... I assume there is something fucked up on the old PC, probably not grounded properly or something. Scary to think that it could have been worse :heckno:

There is a scary amount of half-truths and misinformation regarding electrical safety here.

Voltage is definitely a factor in case of an electric shock. All the textbooks that have been saying 25mA is enough to kill someone assumes that a full 25mA reaches something vital, like the heart.

Your body is a natural resistor, if the amperage is high and the voltage is low, your skin will dissipate a large portion of the energy as heat before the remaining power will penetrate through it. If your voltage is high, the less energy gets dissipated while it travels through your skin and into your body.

In other words, you need significantly more energy at low voltage to electrocute someone than high voltage. Where does the energy go if it is dissipated? It becomes electrical burns and other not as serious electrical injuries.

With the two factors voltage and current, we have watt, which is voltage * current. But watt is a unit of power, a transfer rate of energy, not an actual quantity of energy.

For all those who pay their electrical bills would know the term kWh. That is a measure of units of energy, it is multiplied by power * time. This determines if the electrical shock has sufficient energy to traverse all the way to your heart before it is completely dissipated by the rest of your body.

You can have a 10,000v 1A shock, but if it's only for a microsecond, it will be completely dissipated by your skin and muscles before it reaches anywhere near your heart. You would have nasty jolt, but that is it. This principle works the same for static shocks (along with a bunch of other factors such air resistance and what not).

So there you have it, amps itself won't kill you, it's a mixture of voltage, amperage time and electrical type (AC or DC)

Just bought a replacement charger on eBay from China... Now I'm nervous. Granted, it's not for iPhone, but Android, and I bought it solely for the USB-microUSB cable.

update:

It is actually a iphone4, not iphone5, the charger is non-oem. However, the police investigator shows the charger and the cable are in good condition, there are several burn mark on the phone itself. Apple has nothing to say about this incident.

Did anyone expect this article to be about a flight attendant getting electrocuted while on an air plane?

Electricity was the one part of physics I really had problems understanding back in high-school/university...

Well there you have it, some defective made in China charger.

Did the police investigator OPEN up the charger itself? It might be fried.

I weld with a 50A machine and don't even wear gloves.

this whole thing seem laughable to me.

even if China uses 220V the tiny wire inside an iphone cable woulda melted away before killing anyone. more than likely she stepped out of a shower dripping wet, grabbed her phone while it was plugged in, water ran down the cable and into the outlet. Boyfriend dries her off tries to sue Apple.

bunch of bullshit...no way a 5v discharge will kill anyone! she took crack!

She should of had a Lifeproof case, they claim to be shock proof.

iPhone Cases and iPad Cases | LifeProof

Korean sockets run on 220v. That's why their plugs are designed a lot more hardcore in terms of hard-to-get-at than north American ones.

Wrong kind of shock.

So Apple has a charger trade-in program on. Bring in your no-name USB charger to Apple and they will dispose of it and give you a new Apple charger for $10 (regular price $19).

Finish reading all the electrical engineer posts on here, click over to facebook and the first thing in my news feed is this:



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