Comment on Are modern electronic devices (i.e. cell phones) still susceptible to damage from magnets?
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You’re probably fine.
The reason you didn’t wanted magnets near technology before is because we relied on magnetic fields for stuff, so magnets distorted those uses. Nowadays we usually don’t have any magnetic parts on a phone, so unless you have a super strong magnet extremely close to the electronics you should be fine.
Specifically CRT monitors were tiny particle accelerators that shot electrons to a coat of phosphorescent material, they used magnets to redirect the electrons to hit the correct pixels at the right time. So putting a magnet nearby would pull the beam in a different direction distorting the image and shifting it’s colors (because the electrons were now hitting different color pixels). It was not irreversible, usually removing the magnet is all you had to do, but sometimes you might have magnetized something and the beam would remain crooked for a while.
The other thing that would be affected by magnets were hard disks, your PC might still have one so you might not want to put magnets near it, but our phone doesn’t. HDs stored information using magnetic fields into a disk, similar to a DVD except using a tiny needle that would magnetize the disk in one direction to write a 1 and on the opposite to write a 0. Taking a magnet near that would essentially erase all of the data in that disk. Modern storage use very different methods for storing data that don’t depend on magnetism, so you’re fine.
OwOarchist@pawb.social 1 week ago
And, really, when it comes to general electronics that aren’t CRT screens or hard drives, it’s not the strength of the magnet that ultimately matters – it’s how quickly and how intensely the magnetic field changes.
Changes in magnetic field will induce currents in any nearby conductive material, including the circuit board traces and wires of any electronic device. If a strong enough magnetic field changes fast enough, the induced currents will be high enough to cause currents that are higher than the components can handle and damage the device. Small, weak magnets are unlikely to ever be a problem, since you’d have to get them moving very fast in order to reach that damage threshold. But, on the other side of the magnetic power spectrum, even extremely strong magnets won’t cause damage as long as they’re moved slowly relative to the device. The more powerful the magnet, the slower you need to be in order to avoid damage.