
iPhones are allergic to helium - kwiens
https://ifixit.org/blog/11986/iphones-are-allergic-to-helium/
======
blattimwind
> So what else could it be? Well, at the heart of every electronic device is a
> clock. Traditionally, these are quartz oscillators, crystals that vibrate at
> a specific predictable frequency—generally 32 kHz.

Watch crystals run at 32[.768] kHz because you can divide with a binary
counter by 2^16 and get 1 pps to drive the Lavet stepper driving the seconds
hand.

Watch crystals are also commonly used by MCUs for their RTC (real time, very
low power clock), but never used to produce the main clock of a SoC or
something like that. Mostly because that'd need an insanely high
multiplication through a PLL (higher frequency multiplication ~ higher phase
noise). Base clock crystals are typically 20-50 MHz.

Quartz crystals used to be hermetically sealed.

~~~
DrStalker
> Quartz crystals used to be hermetically sealed.

Are they sealed against helium though? It can get through a lot of materials
that more common gases can't.

~~~
Triesault
Hermetically sealed by definition is airtight, i.e. "excludes the passage of
air, oxygen, or other gases". [1] With that said, the diffusion rate depends
on both the properties of both the seal and the gas.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_seal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_seal)

~~~
garmaine
Very few air seals protect against helium, the smallest gas. Most materials,
even metals, are like sponges to helium. It'll seep through slowly.

~~~
Wingman4l7
I was about to correct you and say that hydrogen is the smallest, but
apparently, hydrogen's atomic radius is actually a bit bigger. Helium's radius
is smaller due to the larger charge of the nucleus making for a tighter
electron cloud.

~~~
manojlds
I too had the same thought, and then thought maybe hydrogen molecule is being
considered. Read up to see that hydrogen atom has bigger radius. TIL.

------
dvno42
Here is the Post-mortem from the OP on Reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem_mri_disables_every_ios_device_in/)

~~~
macintux
There are some fascinating weird stories in that thread.

~~~
tlrobinson
It reminds me of the classic "500 mile email"
[https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

------
ThePhysicist
Helium is very good at getting through the tiniest cracks due to its small
atomic diameter. One uses it to find leaks in devices with ultra-high vacuum
seals (e.g. in low-temperature physics) by attaching a pump with a simple mass
spectrometer sensitive to Helium to the device under test and then using a
small helium gun to test different parts of the device from the outside. When
spraying it at the leak some of it is pushed inside by the pressure difference
and can be detected by the pump spectrometer.

Hydrogen would be even better of course but it is rather dangerous when mixed
with air.

~~~
klodolph
Wouldn’t hydrogen only work if it was atomic hydrogen? I thought molecular
hydrogen gas was larger than helium.

~~~
dogma1138
Hydrogen exists as H2 in its elemental form you’ll you’ll need to ionize it to
separate it and keep it in an ionized or other way isolated form to prevent it
from binding to other hydrogen atoms.

~~~
klodolph
If you are talking about ionized hydrogen, you are no longer talking about a
gas. If it’s ionized, it is a plasma.

~~~
warrenm
And if it's a plasma...it's gonna melt whatever you're trying to leak-check :)

------
zaroth
Maybe I'm just a fanboy, but I found one of the most impressive parts of the
story, aside from actually tracking down the root cause, was that the iPhone
User's Guide actually specifically addresses this, along with explaining that
it's necessary to give it about a week for the helium to diffuse.

~~~
2bitencryption
You just know there was a days-long meeting about "the Helium problem",
including graphs of how likely different user-personas are to enter a
zeppelin, work in a balloon factory, or attend exceedingly well-funded
birthday parties.

After debating late nights about whether to pony up for the new better-sealed
clock, someone said "Screw it, throw it in the user agreement."

~~~
gcb0
"better sealed clock" would be the universally used quartz resonator, but that
would have added 0.002$ to their cost. Unthinkable.

~~~
jsjohnst
Nice try! The SiT512 Apple uses is more expensive than a quartz resonator. I
don’t have Apple’s specific BOM details, but I’d guess it’s likely something
like 2x the cost.

~~~
gcb0
it's only more expensive in small quantities. after you ramp up, it's
infinitely cheaper as you can produce them on waffers. also you are thinking
BOM alone. the selling point of silicon mechanical instead of crystal is that
it can be assembled faster and cheaper, greatly offsetting the item cost.

but don't trust me, see the "advantages" of manufacturers promotion
[https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/look-inside-
programm...](https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/look-inside-programmable-
mems-clock-chips)

------
gok
I feel like the buried lede is that the MRI operators vented large quantities
of helium into the hospital's HVAC and didn't think to tell anyone.

~~~
varenc
Oxygen monitors are standard practice when you have MRI machines and Helium
cooling. I would like to assume that this monitoring was in place and it never
raised any flags? [https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/helium-mri-rooms-
around-w...](https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/helium-mri-rooms-around-
world/)

The air’s usual O2 concentration is ~20.5% and it looks like safety monitors
trigger at 19.5% and 18%: [https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/all-categories-
gas-monito...](https://www.pureairemonitoring.com/all-categories-gas-
monitorsair-check-o2-oxygen-deficiency-monitor-for-co2-n2-storage-areas/)

Helium makes up less than 0.0005% of air naturally. I’m guessing that
increasing He concentration 1000 times to 0.5%, for example, is enough to
cause problems for iPhones, but not enough to trigger the alarm or pose any
danger to people.

~~~
jsjohnst
Considering that Trimix and Heliox used in deep commercial dives can have the
majority (Aka >50%) of the breathable “air” be helium, your theory that
there’s really any risk of danger to people seems a bit unwarranted to me.

~~~
brianpgordon
Helium isn't _toxic_ but it displaces oxygen. Heliox still contains enough
oxygen to breathe (at sea level it's 21% oxygen just like normal atmosphere,
and when diving the partial pressure of oxygen is the same as oxygen in normal
atmosphere). But if you release helium into a room full of air, patients with
already-compromised respiratory systems from injury or from respiratory
diseases or from opioid painkillers could be at risk for brain damage or death
if they were borderline already and not being monitored closely enough.

The author's cavalier "I bet the nurse’s voices were higher pitched that day!"
was incredibly inappropriate given the potential danger.

~~~
jsjohnst
> Helium isn't toxic but it displaces oxygen.

While technically correct in theory, in any real world environment Helium will
not displace Oxygen unless you are dumping orders of magnitude more helium
than in this scenario.

> Heliox still contains enough oxygen to breathe (at sea level it's 21% oxygen
> just like normal atmosphere, and when diving the partial pressure of oxygen
> is the same as oxygen in normal atmosphere).

There’s so much wrong with this (and the rest of your post) I can’t think of a
polite way to respond, so I’ll just wish you a good day.

~~~
inlined
I’ll admit I haven’t gotten that far in my diving certs yet, but isn’t the
point of Heliox so that you can have less than 21% O2 at high depths to avoid
narcosis and a fatal ppO2?

~~~
belorn
To simplify it a bit.

The point is to keep partial pressure of oxygen below that of maximum safe
limit of 1.2 to 1.6. For example, 100% oxygen at surface is 1.0 and thus safe
but will very fast reach maximum when you increase the pressure just by a few
meters. Regular air with 21% oxygen will start to be a problem at 50 meters,
so divers that need to go deeper need to use mixes that has less than 21%
oxygen. When a mix is less than 18% oxygen they become hypoxic and cannot
safely be used at shallow depth.

So the point is not to get "the same as oxygen in normal atmosphere". It is to
keep the partial pressure of oxygen within safe limits, usually between 0.18
pp02 and 1.4 pp02 depending on a multitude of factors and safety margins.

~~~
brianpgordon
The only point I was trying to convey with that statement was that there might
be much less oxygen by volume in deep-diving heliox but the partial pressure
of oxygen is still maintained so that cellular respiration can continue
normally. Was that the only thing you thought was outrageously wrong with my
comment?

~~~
belorn
I am not jsjohnst, but the only additional nitpick is that Heliox is any blend
that is exclusively helium and oxygen and the reason why heliox is more
commonly used for deep dive is that helium has less resistance compared to
nitrogen, meaning that pushing compressed air through ones respiratory system
takes a bit less effort. Helium in heliox is thus used to displace the
nitrogen, with the oxygen ratio being adjusted based on health, depth, bottom
depth, purpose, decompression, surface interval and so on.

------
icameron
This is the first time that I remember seeing a story evolve on the internet.
What was originally from a post on r/sysadmin 3 weeks ago is now summarized on
a Blog article that's at the top of HN. Will it get picked up my mainstream
media and be on everyone's news feed by next week? Or tomorrow, now that its
picked up momentum? Besides being a really fascinating story, its having an
interesting journey as news travels through different outlets and gets
condensed and filtered down to more consumable forms.

~~~
blattimwind
You weren't around when the Meltdown rumors started?

~~~
Phlarp
I remember hearing plenty of whispering that Intel had a major bug disclosure
coming up, but for most of that time I feel like the majority of speculation
was centered around the Intel ME.

Sadly my immediate reaction to this post on /r/sysadmin was to discount it, or
rather attribute it to some external factor that nobody could possibly figure
out and entirely unrelated to the MRI. In this case I was quite happy to be
proven wrong by the follow up posts and subsequent article.

I'm really curious why something they can generalize to "helium leaking into
the quartz oscillator" only affected Apple products. What feat of
manufacturing keeps a broad range of OEMs safe on the Android side but so
eludes Apple? Worse yet, was some "cost savings" engineered between iphone 5s
and 6 that ultimately introduced this issue?

~~~
caf
It wasn't a quartz oscillator - it was the MEMS oscillator that Apple was
using in place of a quartz oscillator that is speculated to be the root cause.

The other phones involved still used quartz.

------
methou
We had this problem too.

Every time my colleague brought his phone to the control room the Cellular
stops working for like a day or two, but my 6s worked just fine anywhere even
next to a Dewar that's venting Helium. Now the mystery is solved!

BTW, among us there are others who accidentally brought their phones near or
even into the MR bore during maintenance, but none of these devices has done
any permanent damage to our phones, except one accelerometer on a cheap
Chinese phone, even in a 7T magnet. So I never thought that MRI could be
causing the problem.

------
warrenm
It's in the iPhone user guide ... maybe not something everyone reads, but it
has been known for some time

That said - a 120l leak of liquid helium is both stupidly expensive, and
highly damaging to the MRI unit: there's a bath of ~1000-1500l of liquid
helium in an MRI to keep the superconducting coils at superconducting
temperatures. Losing ~10% of that volume _probably_ means the unit won't work

~~~
terramex
When you install a new unit you use additional helium that boils off just to
bring it to superconducting temperature.

~~~
warrenm
>When you install a new unit you use additional helium that boils off just to
bring it to superconducting temperature.

Nope - well, not with any of the ones with which I am familiar: they're
shipped full _most_ of the time

------
afturner
Few things; Isn't it a bit odd that a hospital MRI machine room isn't being
monitored for these kinds of things? I'm curious, not accusatory.

Also, this could be a potentially catastrophic tool for terrorists. As trivial
as it sounds, it's even worse than a traditional frequency jammer because it
renders the device unusable instead of just not being able to communicate with
the outside world.

Edit: On the other hand, interesting counter-terrorism tool as well. Is there
any precedent for the CIA using this sort thing intentionally?

~~~
fabian2k
There are almost certainly oxygen sensors in that room. The helium
concentration was probably not high enough to displace enough oxygen to
trigger them. Though it wouldn't entirely surprise me if they were ignored or
disabled.

Liquid helium is rather expensive and would likely draw attention in areas
where it's not usually handled. Really doesn't sound like a useful terrorism
tool.

~~~
squirrelicus
Honestly, even Sarin nerve gas isn't a very useful terrorism tool.

I think the infamous Thunderf00t does a decent job of explaning why
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6uLUaqgWY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6uLUaqgWY0)

~~~
afturner
I love him, will watch

------
anonu
I love HN. I came here to learn more about MEMS RTCs, something I've never
heard about previously... But most of the discussion is about the dangers of a
helium leak... Which is a good point, especially if that leak is in a
hospital.

A bit of googling on MEMS RTC revealed this slightly dated article which I
thought was still interesting: [https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-
notes/index.mvp/id/55...](https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-
notes/index.mvp/id/5545)

Turns out one of the main reasons to switch is for the smaller packaging vs
quartz oscillators.

------
lostlogin
The picture in the article that is labeled as an MR scanner is a CT scanner,
and the people are wearing lead for radiation protection.

~~~
warrenm
The photo is labeled "Morris Hospital’s GE Medical BrightSpeed CT Machine"

~~~
lostlogin
It said ‘MR’ rather than ‘CT’ when I commented, and now it’s a completely
different photo with a new caption.

------
userbinator
It's good that he was able to reproduce it (although with a far higher
concentration of helium), but the original story showed up a few weeks ago at
an EE forum I lurk, and everyone there was skeptical of helium and suspecting
EMP instead:

[https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-in-the-air-
kills-i...](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-in-the-air-kills-ios-
devices/)

 _But an electromagnetic pulse would have taken out medical equipment in the
facility as well, and they were working fine!_

I suspect medical equipment is designed to a higher standard of EMP resistance
than most other products, especially equipment designed to sustain life.
Phones also have antennae specifically designed to pick up EM fields, while
medical equipment like an EEG or ECG is specifically designed to _reject_
them.

Likewise, the devices "reviving" after a week is not unusual if they're just
resetting due to power loss. Immediately disconnecting and reconnecting the
battery would for sure differentiate between helium (device remains dead even
after reset) and EMP (device reboots successfully.)

~~~
whynotminot
Any particular reason you're ignoring the fact this only happened to iOS
devices? Do the various Android manufacturers incorporate additional shielding
to prevent the occasional EMP?

~~~
hrrsn
It probably affects a specific chip Apple are using that may not be present in
the Androids.

~~~
warrenm
Since that's what the article says ... I'm gonna say you're right

------
eismcc
Am I the only one hoping that exposure to helium made Siri sound like a
chipmunk?

------
comboy
Anybody can provide a reason why SiT1532 wouldn't be hermetically sealed? They
are talking about high accuracy, intuitively it would seem that if helium
affects it this badly, then it would be susceptible to some atmospheric
pressure changes (unless the seal worked against air but not helium).

~~~
varenc
They do have a strong hermetical seal on them, but the older ones used by
Apple are still susceptible to “small gas molecules”.

They must have some seal in place and fortunately our air is Nitrogen, O2, and
a little bit of Argon. These can’t get through the seal! Helium is only found
in minuscule amounts naturally and apparently this concentration is so low it
doesn’t matter.

Helium is special because is it has the smallest kinetic diameter of all the
noble gases. You can compare its diameter to other gases here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_diameter#List_of_diame...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_diameter#List_of_diameters)

Helium is frequently used in leak tests since it has a way of working through
even the tiniest of leaks. Elemental Hydrogen is of course smaller, but I
believe you only find Hydrogen as H2 which is a larger molecule than Helium.

~~~
Klathmon
According to that table, Helium is 260, and water is 265, and there are a few
more under 300.

Does that mean that water (in some form) also acts like helium and would be
able to get through that seal?

~~~
varenc
I think the answer is that water has polarity! Though we’re definitely hitting
my chemistry knowledge limit...

While water’s overall charge is neutral, its charge isn’t distributed
symmetrically ans tbis makes it a rather polar molecule. This means part of
molecule have different charges which leads to attraction to other water
molecules thanks to van der waals forces. Basically water naturally clumps up
and won’t squeeze through tiny holes even if it’s kinetic diameter would
technically allow it. (Though I believe very high pressure can force it
through)

Water’s polarity is what causes surface tension and droplets! For comparison,
gasoline is relatively nonpolar, though not as nonpolar as He. If you’ve ever
spilled some you can see it spread out immediately and avoid the droplet
formation and cohesion you’d see with water. Similarly, water tight containers
might not be gasoline tight. (but don’t test this out...)

To correct my comment from earlier: _Helium is special because of its small
kinetic diameter AND because it’s naturally found in a monoatomic and nonpolar
form, as are all noble gases. This lack of polarity leads to minimal
intermolecular attraction that would cause clumping and limit flow._

(I found a reference that helium can be measured flowing through a 1.0nm hole,
albeit at a very low rate. I wonder how close to the 0.260nm kinetic diameter
a hole can get for He to still flow)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Presumably it can still pass through if the hole is smaller than 0.26nm!?

~~~
varenc
I really have no idea...but I don't think so! Or at least if the kinetic
diameter is the smallest hole something can fit through it can't?

Helium's is 260pm or 0.26nm so that could be the limit. But the actual atomic
diameter has a couple different calculated and observed values from 31pm to
140pm so maybe it could fit through holes around that size? My guess is we
don't have the technology to make a hole of precisely that size or even
measure a single He atom passing through such a hole. Would probably have to
find a real expert to know if it's theoretically possible.

------
pftburger
I would be very interested in seeing the the iPhone charges while
"anethitized". I severely doubt data would be accessible via standard
channels, but as this kills the general clock I am assuming it should prevent
any sort of lock protection mechanisms from kicking in indefinitely.

Not sure how you would get it going again and / or how necessary that would
be. Perhaps heating it to excite the helium trapped in the oscillator and
hoping it bounces out.

Could end up being a pretty easy go to law enforcement trick. Put a phone and
a helium balloon in a ziplock bag, pop the balloon, pause the phone, deal with
it later

~~~
gwern
We were wondering if this could be used for iPhone scams. It's a dead-simple
way to apparently fatally & totally destroy in a deep & non-diagnosable way a
pristine iPhone which will however (probably) reverse itself in a few weeks.
It seems like this ought to be exploitable _somehow_. Something like get a new
iPhone, helium it, return it for a refund, and somehow hold onto the phone...
Couldn't figure out how it would actually work, though.

~~~
pftburger
how about get a phone, accumulate normal life scratches for 9 months, "helium
it" hard, so it lasts a while, then get apple to replace it as defective?
iiiiiii dunno... there's a scam in there somewhere, were just not being
creative enough!

~~~
gwern
The problem with that is that the helium doesn't do anything special. Just
damage/destroy the phone some other way. You're not exploiting its special
ability to look _completely_ broken but then magically repair itself in a few
weeks.

------
dang
A smaller discussion on the Reddit thread that this comes from:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334630).

------
robbiet480
It was really fun to watch this story develop over the last few weeks on
/r/SysAdmin. I found myself checking the OP's profile a few times a week
waiting for the smallest update. It's truly mind boggling to me (a software
developer with very very limited hard science experience) to think about the
ramifications of invisible forces causing these kinds of wild goose chase
mysteries.

------
trhway
>the 120 liters ended up going outdoors and how much ended up inside. Helium
expands about 750 times when it expands from a liquid to a gas, so that’s a
lot of helium (90,000 m3 of gaseous He).

the math seems couple orders off - the 120l would make less than 900m3. The
90000m3 would be on the scale of the total volume of a multi-story hospital
building.

~~~
unwind
Three, in fact.

120 × 750 = 90000 liters, or 90 m^3. Very annoying.

------
maxwell_smart
This article isn't great.

First, it illustrates an MRI story with a (mislabeled) picture of a CT
scanner.

Then, it overestimates the volume of gas expelled by a factor of 1000.

170L X 750 = 90k L = 90m^3.

This would fill a 35m^2 (about 350 sq ft) room, maybe the size of a living
room, with pure helium.

~~~
Johnny555
I came up with 125 m^3 here:

[http://www.airproducts.com/Products/Gases/gas-
facts/conversi...](http://www.airproducts.com/Products/Gases/gas-
facts/conversion-formulas/weight-and-volume-equivalents/helium.aspx)

But if you're going to criticize their math, you might want to double check
your own math.

90 m^3 = 2m (height) x 6.7 m^2

(ok, 2m is a little low, 2.5m would be more comfortable.)

~~~
maxwell_smart
My math was fine, but I did get the base numbers wrong. Should have been 120L
as mentioned in the article, which equates to 88.577 m^3 at 15C, which is
pretty chilly. 20C is more like room temp.

But, I'm not sure your math is quite on the money either.

------
aquamo
Wow. This is good to know. As a TriMix SCUBA diver, we should keep our iPhones
away from the fill station and away from us when we are venting / testing our
mixes :-)

~~~
jsjohnst
Aman! Had the exact same thought and glad this story brought it to my
attention.

------
MisterTea
This is strange and I happen to work at a facility that does a lot of open air
helium mass spectrometer leak testing.

I'm and Android user so I have no skin the the game. I'll have to talk to some
people at work tomorrow. A few guys are iPhone users and work in direct
proximity to the helium leak testing stations or use them as well. I know a
woman in the office didn't like her iPhone because of numerous problems but I
never thought to press her for details.

~~~
gmueckl
Would the helium concentration in air actually get high enough to cause
problems? As far as I understand leak testing, you don't need a lot of helium
for that to work.

~~~
MisterTea
Not much at all but some of the knuckleheads try to speed up the process and
crank the pressure until the helium probe is more of a blow gun.

------
mef
That’d be an interesting way to defuse a bomb hooked up to an iPhone with a
power-off failsafe

------
easymovet
Anthropomorphizes the iPhone when you think about how humans react to gaseous
general anesthesia
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflurane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoflurane)

------
roywiggins
> “My immediate thought was that the MRI must have emitted some sort of EMP,
> in which case we could be in a lot of trouble."

I... don't think that's a thing that MRI machines can do. They're even
shielded!

------
Kipters
> Perhaps there’s a bug in iOS that causes crashes when it gets faulty data
> from the gyro? But the bug impacted Apple Watches, too—and they run WatchOS.

Technically, watchOS _is_ iOS

------
solarkraft
TL;DR: Apple uses MEMS clocks (while most Androids contain quarzes), which can
be affected by Helium molecules even though they are sealed in the attempt to
prevent that.

------
happertiger
How will I ever execute my plan to explore the eroding atmospheres of
exoplanets when apple can’t even be bothered to handle a little helium.
Jeez...

------
rlopezcc
Nice discovery! Now scifi/horror movies can stop using the "I have no
reception for no reason" and use helium somewhere in the plot.

------
transpy
It was very entertaining to follow r/sysadmin's threads about this weird
issue, until the guy found out the source of the problem.

------
jlawson
I think we just invented a way to get people to put away their phones during
concerts, plays, and comedy shows.

------
rkagerer
So what's the most effective means we've found to seal against helium
penetration?

------
bayesian_horse
So I guess IPhone owners need to stay away from children's birthday parties?

------
PascLeRasc
I wonder how aware Apple is of this story. I'm sure engineers browsing here
will have seen it, but it'll be interesting to see future iFixit teardowns of
devices to see if the MEMS sensor has any different shielding or if they use a
different chip entirely.

~~~
morley
The article says that Apple's user guide mentions phones not working around
helium:

Exposing iPhone to environments having high concentrations of industrial
chemicals, including near evaporating liquified gasses such as helium, may
damage or impair iPhone functionality.

------
rootsudo
Reddit > ifixit > Hackernews > Buzzfeed/Engadget tomorrow?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Couple of days after Engadget it'll be on mainstream.

------
skwb
It's a little hard to take this article seriously when the caption grossly
misidentifies a GE BrightSpeed CT scan (x-ray) with a MRI machine. My guess is
the magnet was still on (perhaps incorrectly).

------
FriedPickles
Those MEMS device photos (micrographs) are beautiful.

------
mcnichol
I think the correct spin would be to say:

Apple Devices are Helium Detection Canaries.

------
rustcharm
It would be an interesting attack if you needed to disable an iPhone.

~~~
murdockq
Any security hardware using this oscillator would be at risk too. I can see
the Mission Impossible plot to use it to attack a security systems and IP
cameras if they used those chips.

~~~
rtkwe
I'm not sure how far this vulnerability will ever get an attacker because most
devices will probably continue to use regular quarts oscillators that aren't
sensitive to this like MEMS devices. Apple probably only uses them because
they're squeezing every ounce of space and their markups can stand the
increased cost of the MEMS vs the quartz/ceramic oscillators.

------
M_Bakhtiari
Maybe not a good idea to use MEMS avionics on a blimp or dirigible, then.

Here's the Zeppelin NT cockpit, but I can't tell what kind of gyros they may
be using:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/2003-07-...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/2003-07-26_18-06-46_Germany_Baden-
Württemberg_Hagnau.JPG)

------
pankajdoharey
This is hilarious, additionally the software quality of iDevices have gone
down the tube.

------
bdz
From where do they know the guy's name and where does he work?

~~~
saagarjha
They probably contacted him through Reddit.

------
agumonkey
"Hospital cooling gas caused cardiac arrest in fresh Apples."

~~~
anticensor
Hospital cooling gas caused _clock arrest_ in fresh iPhones.

~~~
agumonkey
well, ticker is ticker ;)

------
zeristor
Did iFixit just take a post from reddit and put it on their website?

Did they add anything to it, the write up was quite comprehensive. I’ve got a
bad feeling about this.

------
TwoBit
What is it about Helium that breaks the device? Is the device intended to
contain a vacuum?

~~~
oddevan
TL;DR: it breaks the oscillator that keeps time on the device. This breaks the
clock and eventually has a cascading effect on the system.

The article is pretty straightforward and engaging; it's worth a read!

~~~
SilasX
Oh wow, so the clock is unnecessarily coupled to the other systems?

~~~
sp332
Tons of events are tied to the real-time clock. For example if the interface
code wants to know how fast you're dragging your finger across the screen, it
divides the distance between digitizer samples by the elapsed time. Or to know
if a "tap" is a "long press", it has to know how long it was. All kinds of
stuff depends on that clock.

~~~
SilasX
I remember the double-click (which is time-dependent) still working on my Mac
Plus when the clock was stuck at midnight. It also didn't crash the OS and
make the computer turn off.

~~~
wild_preference
Are you joking?

This is a completely different thing than the UI widget that tells you the
time and may freeze for any reason UI can freeze.

~~~
SilasX
I was never criticizing the fact that time-reporting apps would fail at
reporting the time if the hardware clock broke; I was criticizing the fact
that the whole OS goes down, while the Mac Plus's didn't in the same
circumstance.

------
saagarjha
> Hydrogen and helium are notoriously hard to contain because their molecules
> are so small.

You probably didn't mean "helium molecule"–or if it was, that would very odd,
as helium as a molecule is very rare…

~~~
Theodores
Helium is a 'noble element', check the Periodic Table and tell me how Helium
gets to be part of a molecule. Unless a lot has changed since I was at school
then you aren't going to get a lot of helium 'molecules'. It just doesn't work
like that.

What I don't get is how these helium molecules diffuse into the iPhones so
easily, an awful lot of helium must have to leak for that. Normally helium -
balloon sized quantities - tends to prefer going skyward rather than hide in
an iPhone.

But since that seems to not be the case it would be good to turn up at a
concert where everyone is playing with their hand rectangles rather than
enjoying the moment, then to release some helium to fix that for them...

~~~
palunon
> Helium is a 'noble element', check the Periodic Table and tell me how Helium
> gets to be part of a molecule. Unless a lot has changed since I was at
> school then you aren't going to get a lot of helium 'molecules'. It just
> doesn't work like that

Yeah, well maybe they don't tell you all the details and special cases in
school...

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas_compound](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas_compound)

~~~
Theodores
I checked the link and now I see why you didn't post the relevant quote:

"There is some empirical and theoretical evidence for a few metastable helium
compounds which may exist at very low temperatures or extreme pressures. The
stable cation HeH+ was reported in 1925."

Maybe you do get these things happening inside a particularly pedantic iphone
but regular chemistry suffices here, the general idea of the Periodic Table
stands true, noble gasses on the right hand side don't react to instantly form
co-valent bonds with the other elements. Sure, anything can happen in the side
of a giant thermo-nuclear reactor but, in every day situations classical
understanding works great.

