iPhone 12 deemed too hot to handle for France's radiation standards Apple's launch party for its latest iPhone was marred slightly yesterday as the French National Frequency Agency (ANFR) told the company that its iPhone 12 breached electromagnetic wave limits. At issue is the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) observed on the iPhone 12, which the ANFR has said exceeds European limits. The phone …
The maximum power limits are only hit when a phone is on the edge of range from the tower, so all it would do is make your phone stop working in the outer fringes of distance from the tower where it needs maximum power for the tower to hear them - basically in places where you see only one bar today. And probably only in certain bands. I imagine Apple could release this update and few would notice except people who get only one bar of reception in their house.
In a smaller country it would perhaps be unnoticed. But absolutely barking mad huge areas of France are extremely rural and the phone signal is shit...especially in mountainous areas like the Pyrenees etc.
The infrastructure in France isn't great for comms in quite a lot of parts of France.
There are large areas of France where it is still impossible to get broadband and large numbers of people still use dial up. I'm not kidding! It's a similar story with mobile networks...any Frenchies here living in the Pyrenees? Tell us what it's like.
Just like Britain isn't in London, France isn't in Paris.
True, but you also have to factor in propagation and directionality (and therefore what percentage of the radiation is absorbed by what mass).
As an aside, it always amuses me the way people fuss about "radiation from the mast" when the field strength to someone holding a phone is much, much lower than that generated by the device they are holding.
>> It sounds strange to me that the testing was done 3 years after product release.
> Yes, that does seem rather quick by French bureaucracy standards.
Yeah, it can take that long to prove you're not dead...
I had dealings with the French approval authorities whilst working for a major consumer electronics manufacturer. They were unforgiving. If our products didn't meet the same specification as the pre-production sample, nothing was getting onto their market.
And don't get me started on their insistence that multi-lingual instruction manuals were unacceptable, ditto for box labelling. I think you get the picture here....
Ex-electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) test engineer here. Usually, European national bodies such as ANFR follow the standards set by the EU authorities, CENELEC and/or ETSI. These in turn follow the internation bodies such as CISPR and the IEC.
So what we evidently have is ANFR testing a random sample and finding it wanting. Strangely, they do not necessarily accept that the original sample or exercise regime, put forward by the manufacturer for formal testing, necessarily reflects (sic) the production version in use. How can anybody not trust Apple? Aww.... Anyway, the burden is now on Apple to show that the ANFR result is either flawed or incredibly rare. No show, no deal, it's how all EMC consumer testing works.
It isn't as if the phones spontaneously started emitting higher power. Any French citizen actually worried about this should probably be more worried about how backlogged they appear to be in such measurements. How many phones have been introduced to the French market by all OEMs in the past three years, and they are only getting around to Apple now? Good luck getting some off brand Android that sells less than a quarter million a year tested in less time!
They tested 141 phones. Between our vacations, lunches, and strikes, hey, it takes time. Also, of course, finding a phone plan for extended families to get 141 phones for cheap.
https://www.anfr.fr/liste-actualites/actualite/retrait-temporaire-du-marche-de-liphone-12-pour-non-conformite-de-ces-appareils-a-la-reglementation-europeenne
"radioactivity" (gamma radiation) is also electromagnetic radiation (at the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum). I am fairly sure you weren't thinking that the phones emit large numbers of beta particles (they will emit small amounts of beta particles because the Carbon-14 isotope is present in many organic materials).
The distinction is that these standards are for non-ionizing radiation. That is confined to EM fields (including electric, magnetic and electromagnetic) with photon energies below that of hard ultraviolet light / X-rays. All nuclear radiation is ionizing, and is subject to separate legislation. The English language is such that the term "radiation" should be understood in the context in which it is mentioned, one does not endlessly repeat obvious qualifiers.
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