Apple has issued a recall of a certain type of official iPhone charger issued throughout the European region in recent years.
This follows the discovery that the Apple 5W European USB power adapter can overheat in rare cases.
The charger would have been issued with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4S handsets between October 2009 and September 2012.
It would also have been sold as a stand-alone accessory, which many UK users may have picked up on their European travels rather than relying on a dodgy plug adapter to juice up their £500 smartphone.
As part of the recall, Apple has offered to replace every affected power adapter free of charge. All customers have to do is take their charger into an Apple Retail Store or an authorised Apple service provider.
You’ll also need to bring along your iPhone, as they will need to verify your serial number.
Check out the above picture to help identify the problematic charger. Look at the charger prong-on and make a note of the Model text on the top right, as well as the large ‘CE’ text in between the two prongs.
If your charger has solid CE writing and a model number of A1300, you have one of the potentially faulty units on your hands.
There is a similarly shaped A1400 adaptor out there that doesn’t suffer from the same issue.
It’s a bit of an embarrassment for Apple, especially after it ran an initiative to help customers exchange their third party chargers for official ones last year. This followed a case where a third-party charger had electrocuted a young Chinese woman.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
