14 DAY TRIAL // Phone explosions no longer make the headlines as often as before, but it doesn’t mean companies can already forget about such incidents that happened in the past.
Apple, for instance, is now dragged to court by a woman who claims that an iPad burst into flames in their kitchen, allegedly causing a fire that eventually hilled her husband.
Julia Ireland Meo says the incident happened in February 2017, and court documents published by Patently Apple point to the battery pack as the culprit.
The fire was “caused by a defect in the subject tablet, specifically affecting the subject tablet’s battery pack,” the papers read.
Apple tight-lipped on the lawsuit
The woman now brought several claims against Apple, including strict products liability, wrongful death, and survival action. Obviously, Apple has remained completely tight-lipped on the lawsuit.
“The subject tablet was unreasonably dangerous and unsafe for its intended purpose by reasons of defects in its design and/or its manufacture and/or lack of adequate warnings which existed when Defendant Apple placed the subject tablet into the stream of commerce and/or when Defendant distributed and/or sold the updates to the subject tablet,” the lawsuit reads.
“The fire and the resulting death of the decedent, Bradley Ireland, was caused by the defectively design and/or defectively manufactured subject tablet.”
This is one of the few lawsuits against Apple over devices that caught fire, as the Cupertino-based tech giant’s phones and tablets haven’t been affected by widespread issues in this regard.
South Korean rival Samsung, on the other hand, was forced to retire a full series of phones after it discovered faulty batteries potentially suffering from overheating and eventually leading to risks of fire.
Reports of iPhones bursting into flames made the rounds occasionally, but Apple hasn’t acknowledged any battery issue that could increase the risk of similar incidents on more devices.