A man has suffered severe burns after his iPhone exploded following a fall from his mountain bike.
The mountain biker says Apple have promised to investigate after his handset burned through his shorts and two layers of skin. Gareth Clear’s iPhone 6 bore the brunt of the impact when the 36-year-old took a tumble during a ride around Sydney’s Manly Dam on Sunday afternoon.
He noticed smoke and searing heat coming from his phone seconds before it exploded, melting through his shorts and two layers of skin on his upper right thigh. Mr Clear, who lives in Bondi, needed a skin graft at the burns unit of the Royal North Shore Hospital.
He told the Daily Telegraph newspaper: ‘The phone did hit the ground, it didn’t just spontaneously combust.’It was a one in one million chance I hit a part of the phone which pierced the lithium battery and it exploded.
‘I’m 36, I’ve had a mobile phone for 18 years of my life and for that thing to explode or short circuit and cause it to temporarily ignite.’I could see the metal bending and all the lithium leaking out of the bottom end.’