Joining a long and storied lineage of combustible Apple products, an iPhone 4 recently caught on fire when being hooked up to a computer via its Apple-provided USB cord. The phone was fried and its owner's hand singed, reports BGR.


According to a source inside AT&T, the charring resulted from a faulty USB port and not human error:

Apple did confirm to our AT&T connection that this did appear to be a defective USB port and not some sort of user error. Our source went onto say that the phone bezel was extremely hot (obviously), and it slightly burned the customers hand. The USB port in the phone was slightly melted and the cord was badly melted (as is apparent in the pictures).


Not that anyone expects this to be a widespread concern, but it's unfortunate that every time a new iPod or iPhone comes out there seems to be at least one or two reports of the device catching fire. There was the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch last year, the iPod Nano the year before that, and other scattered incidents in between.

It's a known, recurring problem. So why, after all these years, does something as serious as a flammable gadget continue to be an issue? [Boy Genius Report]