A Florida man was listening to dance music while working out at his local gym when he noticed white smoke emerging from his Apple AirPods earphones. He quickly took them off and placed them down on a piece of gym equipment and went to go and fetch help, when he returned one of the AirPods appeared to have already exploded.
A story about an exploding personal device brings to mind quite a few incidents from a few years ago and quite recently. Such as the Beats headphones that exploded in flight burning a woman"s ears, or the ubiquitous Samsung Galaxy Note 7 that was prone to enough fiery incidents that it caused a series of nightmares for the company. Only a few weeks ago a man narrowly missed having an iPhone battery explode in his mouth, after he foolishly decided to do a gold-prospector-styled bite test to see if the battery was real.
In this case, the man showed the AirPods to WFLA, a local TV news station, and the earphone in question appears to have some flame damage and does look severely mangled. However, not the man, or anyone else, was present to see the actual pop or explosion of the small device so we cannot yet be certain as to what may have actually happened.
A spokesperson from Apple has told the news station that it is investigating the incident to find out what exactly happened. If the device was at fault and more of these incidents were to happen, this could lead to a major headache for the company as AirPods have been widely distributed and may entail a large recall operation. However, this is still the first report of such an incident happening to a pair of AirPods and might only be a once-off incident.