@@annana6098it doesn’t cost anything to fix you just leave it alone for a few hours in fresh air, the helium leaves the MEMS chip and starts working fine
The reason this happens is because the Mems oscillators work in a vacuum, the helium sneaks in and causes a friction type of thing to happen causing the iPhone to be bricked for a couple days, maybe longer
@@Penguinmanereikel Probably not. Helium is uniquely capable of sneaking into small gaps because it is the smallest gas-its particles are monatomic and it has the smallest atomic radius. Hydrogen actually has a larger radius than helium because it has half the nuclear charge, therefore attracting its electron less strongly. It is also a diatomic molecule, which makes it significantly larger. If all noble gases had this effect, Apple wouldn’t be selling very many iPhones, since atmospheric argon would brick them!
The chemical or physical effect the helium has on the phone would be nice to know too. I thought helium is an inert gas Edit: If you have to say something about this, maybe read the comments first because said thing maybe already is mentioned there.
no it's actually quite toxic and deadly in high quantities, it just doesn't burn well. hydrogen on the other hand, not toxic you can breathe it all you want basically, but it burns incredibly well. realistically it all depends on what you mean by inert.
Helium is inert, but it's also considerably less dense than air. What happened is the helium got into the oscillator causing it to vibrate faster due to the lower density of helium gas, similar to how your voice goes squeaky after you take a breathe full of helium.
@@xdyt2007 There's no war to be had. Bro isn't wrong lmao. Seems like a pretty bad design flaw to have your phone get bricked from the presence of a gas that goes into balloons.
@@jamesrosewell9081Apple's official Xserve servers were discontinued in 2011, but solutions to rack mount Mac mini exist. Mac Pro also comes in a rack mount case option. The reasons for doing this are a bit niche, like healthcare where centralizing the server and having clients connect from thin clients reduces attack surface, leasing virtual Macs for developers, or running a service that interfaces with Apple services in some way. A lot of the reasons you'd want a Mac server in the past (.Mac hosting, local mobileme (iCloud), Mac remote profile) are ether outdated or not offered anymore. There's no good reason not to just use a PC/ARM based server with Debian to host current services at a much lower cost.
i imagine there probably just wasn't enough helium leaking out for it to happen, but it's really funny to imagine everyone in the hospital's voices suddenly getting gradually higher pitched
God, imagine hearing a doctor shouting orders to nurses in a squeaky helium voice. I'd be dying of laughter and I wouldn't be able to take them seriously.
Well, it's an inert gas, so it's pretty boring. Non-toxic, doesn't bing with hemoglobin doesn't react with anything, just makes your voice sound funny if you inhale it in high concentration. Because it's less dense than air, sound created by your vocal cords has higher pitch. So yeah, Helium is totally harmless unless the concentration is so high where isn't enough oxygen in the room, but it's unlikely to happen in non hermetically sealed room. But just in case if everyone around you speak in funny high-pitched voice, you should probably leave the room.
I work at a place where we blow up hundreds of helium balloons a day. I switched from Android to the iPhone X when it came out. I had 3 brick in a row on me and get replaced under warranty. No one could figure it out, the apple store employees thought it was a software glitch on my Cloud backup and had me not restore from back up on the third one, it still happened. In this same time period I went through 2 Apple watches. My assumption was always static build up from blowing balloons but now it seems like helium. Finally a mystery solved. I ditched Apple after the third one lol.
Not much, it didn't kill every one and it took a while, but all it takes is the helium touching one piece a few times, so at that point it's basically a game of chance played every millisecond, with higher odds the longer it goes.
not necessarily the amount required to break a phone could be quite a bit lower than the amount it takes to change voice pitch. you need your lungs to be completely full of a gas to change the pitch of your voice.
My guess? MEMS uses tiny horizontal vibrations in the metal tines on a thin circuit board. Helium being trapped under the surface might stop them from vibrating as it's forced to float
@@ivans5204 Notably helium is also very good at getting through just about anything so it'd make sense for it to cause issues where other gases (like nitrogen, oxygen, etc.) wouldn't. Making something helium-proof isn't exactly easy, and I wouldn't be remotely surprised if it wasn't even a consideration considering how rare this kind of scenario is.
@@ivans5204Not exactly, Quarts oscillation is pretty straightforward but Mems is actually creating a stable electronic frequency that is used in place of the vibrating quartz. Problem is that if helium works its way into the Mem oscillator you change the medium that the current is going thru and screw up the frequency. SItime was one of the first companies to make the technology small enough for handheld devices yet still affordable. But the Helium issue has been known for like a decade, they even have manufacturing warnings from SItime.
What they said is right (according to the other comments I read). The clock that runs the computer (very necessary if you want it to compute) has a vacuum inside it. Hydrogen gas can pass through basically anything (including solid metal, though the clock in apple phones is mostly silicon and plastic) so it gets inside the clock and gets in the way of it working. Computers and other phones use a quartz clock that doesn't have this issue. According to one person, the quartz clocks might use more power and be easier to break, which is why Apple probably chose not to use them.
@@jonathanmacdonald9609 Helium gas, not hydrogen. Hydrogen, for a couple of reasons, is the easiest to understand being that it's twice the size of helium when not bonded and almost always found at the very least in the di-hydrogen bonded form. The helium gets into the MEM oscillator and disrupts the continuous frequency that needs to be maintained in a vacuum by altering the very state of that vacuum. Quartz oscillators expansions of the quartz crystal lattice through the electric expansion (that isn't the correct term) to create a proper waveform frequency. Whereas MEM ossicilaters use a current to create a sustained frequency which in a vacuum is more accurate, uses less power, and has greater impact resistance. I'm working off the top of my head so most of the vocab is incorrect.
@@hagestadbecause helium is completely harmless, simple as. it can even be used instead of nitogen for breathing gas mixtures! (and it is, heliox is used both in hospitals and deep sea diving)
@@kitty.x3 so is nitrogen. What im saying is that the % of it in the air that would have wrecked those phones should cause asphyxiation to humans. I bet we are not being told the full story.
As an electronic engineer this was really a cool thing to dig into it when I first heard of it. A chunk of my study was on finite state machines and the precursors to computers. Even they need a clock to step everything. When you stop the clock like what happened here everything in the system stops and there is no self recovery from this since the clock signal is the driving force.
My question: Brick as in "hard crash/hard lock" or brick as in "become a silicon paper weight for the rest of time"? People seem to use it for either case but I've always known it as the latter. Just curious what's actually happening to the devices.
@@TimeSurfer206probably should be called "freeze" then. Brick is when the phone is dead for good. Unless you're some sort of egghead alien knowing how to fix anything.
Lmfao you're going to judge the installation of a highly specified machine that is cooled with a molecule that is notorious for seeping through basically any gasket, crack, or crevice? If it was radioactive or otherwise somehow dangerous, sure, judge away, but all this means is its going to cost a shit ton to replace the helium, and likely the company who installed it is going to pay out the ass on that. I wouldn't want to be those technicians, but shit does happen, even on multi-million dollar machines.
Honestly, it’s something you can’t really blame Apple for. It’s not like it’s a common thing to be in a room surrounded by helium, so they probably didn’t even know. And it’s not just their newer phones, but also older considering the demonstration video
I don't get the craze about having to have an iPhone. It makes you somewhat dependent and you can only get spare parts or chargers from apple. I've always been fine with my android phones
Helium is a tiny molecule. It will get through most seals. That's why helium balloons deflate so quickly, the helium just diffuses out. Even ignoring that, a water seal does not mean a gas can't get it. Water has surface tension, which means the seal can have small gaps but still be effective at keeping water out, while letting air through.
Dude, balloons can leak out helium due to how small the molecules are, and that's arguably a tighter seal than the phone. It will absolutely still seep in.
Another reason why I never ever buy iPhones no products from that company whatsoever. Like I always tell people overpriced garbage you're paying for a fed and not even a good one
In other words if helium is known as the laughing gass then I phones don't have a sense of humor. This is so cool and would make a fantastic plot point to a fun heist movie. 😂
Just another reason to be glad to chosen to use an older model Android instead of chasing status symbols for basic phone functions. Of course I don't hang around helium sources very often but good to know.
Just a note. Helium is chemically inert. What likely happened is that it altered the physical properties of the gaseous compartment within the MEMS chamber which ruined the speed at which it “oscillates”. I wonder if the devices recuperated after being left in a regular air location, or whether there was more extensive damage
"Bricked" typically means damage that renders the device permanently nonfunctional unless it's repaired. Iphones eventually recover from helium exposure without any repair work.
