Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

anfr.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 309 posts

Re: iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

#151

Post by ikekkdcjkfke »

lagrange77 wrote: post #145
paulmd wrote: post #100

Worth noting that this is due to the French regulators applying the same SAR absorption standard as the rest of the EU but at a closer distance. Obviously radiation follows the inverse square law so this means you absorb more radiation in France ;) Even despite this reduced allowable emission the iPhone is barely out of compliance, they will need to reduce power less than 10% or simply get another few millimeters far…

I thought this whole EM radiation fear was bogus. How does it even interact with the body? There are obviously no neutrons flying around..

Wasn't the point of 2.4 GHz being unregulated because it's used by microwave ovens (citation needed). It interacts strongly with water atleast

Re: iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

#152

Post by oblio »

dwaite wrote: post #148
oblio wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The age argument doesn't seem to be holding up since cancer rates are growing for younger people: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/16/health/early-onset-cancer... Better screening could be a factor. Also, population growth doesn't matter for a *rate*.

> Also, population growth doesn't matter for a rate . You cited cases, not a rate.

Europe's population (and EU's, if you compare the sum of current member state populations) is basically flat since 1995.

Ergo the increase in cases means an increase in rate.

Re: iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

#154

Post by XorNot »

ikekkdcjkfke wrote: post #151
lagrange77 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this whole EM radiation fear was bogus. How does it even interact with the body? There are obviously no neutrons flying around..

Wasn't the point of 2.4 GHz being unregulated because it's used by microwave ovens (citation needed). It interacts strongly with water atleast

To produce thermal heating. The RF radiation fear trades off the word "radiation" and how no one actually knows what that means.

Re: iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

#155

Post by lxgr »

lagrange77 wrote: post #145
paulmd wrote: post #100

Worth noting that this is due to the French regulators applying the same SAR absorption standard as the rest of the EU but at a closer distance. Obviously radiation follows the inverse square law so this means you absorb more radiation in France ;) Even despite this reduced allowable emission the iPhone is barely out of compliance, they will need to reduce power less than 10% or simply get another few millimeters far…

I thought this whole EM radiation fear was bogus. How does it even interact with the body? There are obviously no neutrons flying around..

I believe the concern is that non-ionizing radiation can still warm tissues, and depending on the frequency, these can be deeper than what normal sunlight or IR radiation would reach.

Whether a few milliwats of that type of warming are actually cause for concern I don't know, but even if it's bogus, that doesn't mean that regulators will not be enforcing legal maximums anyway.

Re: iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

#156

Post by bee_rider »

Zambyte wrote: post #146
Varloom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly expect that they would admit it and face millions of lawsuits ?

To put "millions" into perspective based on the value of Apple, that is less than a dollar to the average American. Of course, a company doesn't get that large by giving out money with no push back. Just some perspective.

If someone asked me for a dollar in an unpleasant and totally unfounded manner, I’d probably give it to them, even if it was inconsequential.

Re: iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

#157

Post by bee_rider »

baz00 wrote: post #40
fh9302 wrote: post #22

Apple has denied those findings. > Apple said it had provided ANFR with multiple Apple and independent third-party lab results proving its compliance with all applicable SAR regulations and standards in the world. https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-disputes-french-fin...

This doesn't surprise me. It's not unusual to find completely different results from "accredited" labs despite the test methodologies being the same.

How are these labs accredited? Sounds like France has a problem with some labs or possibly an accreditation organization I guess.

Re: iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

#158

Post by lxgr »

garyfirestorm wrote: post #123
xoa wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone with physics knowledge please calm me down? All radio is non-ionizing EM, far lower frequency then visible light, thermal, etc. UV, Xrays, and gamma rays are in the opposite direction, higher frequency. Radio cannot do anything except minor amounts of heating, and at milliwatts of transmission power and inverse square law that's REALLY minor amounts of heating. There is no link to any sort of health effects…

Sun! It emits far more radiation than anything else and we don’t care about walking in sunlight.

That argument is actually the same error that GP criticizes: Wavelength (i.e. quantized energy) matters a lot.

Being irradiated by hundreds of watts of direct sunlight is fine for a short while (and causes skin cancer in the long term!), hundreds of watts of microwave radiation for the same duration is already pretty bad, and the only good thing about hundreds of watts of hard gamma radiation is that you don't have to worry about the long-term effects too much.

With mobile devices, we're talking about dozens or at most hundreds of milliwatts of microwave radiation though; there might be some effect, but I personally doubt it would be significant enough to worry about – earlier cell phones used way higher power levels, and I'm not aware of any link to cancer there. And they've been around for a while!

Last time I read up on it, the heating effect of holding any metal or plastic slab to the side of your head dominates any additional heat transfer from the EM radiation, even for fairly deep tissues.

Re: iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

#159

Post by sudhirj »

lxgr wrote: post #155
lagrange77 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this whole EM radiation fear was bogus. How does it even interact with the body? There are obviously no neutrons flying around..

I believe the concern is that non-ionizing radiation can still warm tissues, and depending on the frequency, these can be deeper than what normal sunlight or IR radiation would reach. Whether a few milliwats of that type of warming are actually cause for concern I don't know, but even if it's bogus, that doesn't mean that regulators will not be enforcing legal maximums anyway.

Is a hot shower illegal in France?

Re: iPhone 12 withdrawn from French market for non-compliance with EU regulation

#160

Post by nemo »

Miraltar wrote: post #91
nikanj wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other side is funded and heavily influenced by the ”buy our Goji berries to shield your body from toxins and our shielding bracelet to stop harmful radiation from altering your chakras” quacks. There are no neutral parties in the argument

You'll have to admit that one side has more to lose and more power than the other

In this day and age there's virtually no barrier to entry for spreading health disinformation and the quack health industry is huge, they sell a _lot_ of schlock. The fact that the people who are factually correct happen to also hold power doesn't matter since the kooks have no barriers to entry for spamming their disinformation across the internet and they're actually hard to avoid (as we see here). The people who are factually correct are generally at a disadvantage since the truth is boring and quacks can sell sensationalism ("your phone causes cancer!").
Post reply on HN