… “Radiation Levels”
I cant stand this. While yes, technically radio and microwaves radiate from a source, we do not use that term to describe anything but particles capable of ionizing other particles. Phones cannot produce UV, Xray, or Gamma radiation. If they are emitting particles from radioactive decay, that would be a level of maliciousness.
Haha, what? This can be fixed via an update?
power levels
Does this mean my already slower iPhone 12 (due to battery age) will become even slower? Better than cancer, I suppose.
It was never going to cause cancer anyway. The limits in France are just really low. Phone radiation is non-ionising, which at the levels it emits is harmless, even the one that breached France’s limits.
No, cpu and antenna power aren’t the same thing.
It’s not ionizing. It’d be impressive (and probably highly illegal) if it was. The “radiation” was below the range of visible light (technically, visible light is a form of radiation), meaning it’s fairly low energy. In order for it to increase your cancer risk, it needs to be above the visible light spectrum (ultraviolet and higher), otherwise it lacks the energy to damage cells directly. Their use of the term “radiation” is hard-core clickbait.
Radiowaves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet and x-rays are all radiation, and they’re all light. If you had the right tools, you could theoretically take a picture using only microwaves and/or radiowaves. Additionally, radiowaves and microwaves are below the visible light range (so they don’t cause cancer) and require a ton of power to cook something (microwave ovens are usually +1000 watts, iirc the iPhone was putting out slightly more than 5 watts in the radiowave range, which afaik requires more power to cook something).
No this will likely limit the max antenna range and give you worse radio reception, but will make no difference to the CPU that runs the UI and apps
Potentially longer battery life, though :)
They could have found a fault in power delivery, which could be the issue. They may just be correcting it. You can guarantee there will be back to back tests done to show any difference, so time will tell.
There’s an option to disable the underclocking in the battery section. Here’s an Apple Support article on it. It’s under the “Performance management turned off” heading. You could have the battery serviced.
I’m impressed your 12 has gone that far already, my XS hasn’t gone that far and is still on the original battery.
Unless it’s a hardware failure causing spurious emission, it just means that transmit power has been reduced in software. Practically, this will reduce the range at which you can communicate to the cell tower. The cell tower reception should remain nominally the the same strength and the same speed, but you will have a reduce range for towers to which you can reliably connect (i.e. dropped connections) because you can’t tell the tower you’re listening. Also, your upload throughput will be lower at a given distance from the tower as your distance from the tower increases beyond a (now smaller) full-connection-strength radius.
I would assume fixing radiation levels via software update can only mean lower radio power -> worse signal strength.
Because the article doesn’t mention it: Will this update be applied to french iPhone 12s only or is this going to affect more phones?
Also, is this affecting the standard 12 only or also 12 Pro and Pro Max?
What about 12 mini?
Lmao they’re only doing it for users in France, not everyone else. I know it’s technically not dangerous and the regulations there just makes the threshold lower, but it sounds so maliciously compliant to do it just in France.
or there are functional downsides to the fix.
Just enough of a functional downgrade to comply with the demand and cause people to think they need to upgrade to the new iPhone.
Ministers later said that though the radiation level was above the accepted standard, it was not dangerous and people were safe to continue using the phones
So why all the dust? Blew into an international incident get me off this dirt ball!
In other news, the French have banned the sun.
