If magnets damage a computer, why aren’t phones damaged by magnetic mounts?
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Magnets don’t damage computers. Magnets damage magnetic media like hard drives, floppy disks, CRT monitors. Your phone doesn’t use magnetic storage media.
Magnets don’t affect a computer to the same degree as people believe. There is a risk that data disks might get magnetized, but even this is not likely because the field created by the writing head is much stronge really close to the surface. Mobile phones don’t have any magnetic disks in them.
Magnets damaging computers is mostly a myth, or more accurately modern computers aren’t negatively impacted by magnets the same way as older computers were.
Magnets could damage magnetic media like floppy disks and CRT monitors that are hardly used anymore.
They could also damage mechanical hard drives but those are shielded to a degree.
Years ago, I worked as a tech helping loan consultants with their laptops for Washington Mutual.
It was realized at one point that the data on the hard disks might be recoverable even from apparently dead drives. We were returning the drives to the manufacturer under warranty. Some of the data was possibly worth millions, so that had to be dealt with.
The hardware techs decided the solution was to smack the drives so hard that the disks would be warped to unreadability or shattered before returning them under warranty. This worked, but since there were accelerometers in the drives and this violated the warranty, this was a bad idea and they were told to stop.
The solution decided upon was to run the drives through an industrial degausser. This was a device that used rapidly oscillating electromagnets to destroy magnetically stored data without damaging the media itself.
So, they bought this machine, took the disk drive out of a functioning laptop, ran it through, and put the drive back into the laptop.
It still booted. It literally destroyed not one byte of data.
I believe that the device did eventually work, but nevertheless, it just isn’t that easy these days. Hasn’t been for years.
Now, back in the days of floppy disks and tape drives, a kitchen magnet would do the job.
Magnets don’t damage technology anywhere near much they used to the only thing they can still potentially damage is fans. Maybe a graphics card and your hard drive due to the spinning parts with a strong enough magnet yes, your phone would probably break either from the screen shattering from hitting the magnet or something else, but the magnets that are on magnetic charges and anywhere strong enough to do so
I was taught they don’t actually damage them but interfere with them if u will. For example, when I was working at a Help Desk & I had some dude call n tell me his computer wouldn’t boot up & it was acting “odd” everytime he tried booting it up. So we dispatched our onsite vendor at the time & this is was over a mountain pass & thru the woods to grandma’s house basically but the travel alone was a nightmare for this. The kid from our vendor gets there & he calls me up & says welp its fixed took all of 5 minutes so I’m heading home. I of course go wtf was going on?! He says dude had his family photos stuck to the side of the stupid thing with magnet photo frames from the weekend camping trip he just got back from. Go friggin fig. He paid for it so whateva. I asked the dude if he had done ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to his computer that Monday morning he told me not a thing but exactly said “naw I haven’t touched it since I got in this morning & it was like this.” Lesson learned for both of us. But it didn’t damage it cuz when all the photos were removed off of the side of his CPU, it booted up just fine. It just caused it according to the dude keep in mind to distort on bootup is all he kept repeating. Said it was really weird looking. Yea I bet. Anyway now I know to ask this when someone remotely mentions to me their computer is strange behaving oddly out of the ordinary never seen this before or it’s really weird looking.
Here’s a thing. My wife bought me a battery quartz watch last year for my birthday. Not expensive, but decent and for everyday wear which can be hard on my watches because I do a lot of manual work around the house etc. Damn thing was rubbish kept stopping and losing time. Took it back and got a replacement within the first month. The replacement watch was the same. Took it back and it was sent for repair which was useless. One year later I buy myself another watch. All good until one morning two weeks after purchase it’s stopped after I got up in morning took it from my bedside draw and (get this) placed it on my mobile/cell phone which has a cover with a magnetic clasp (I do this frequently). Puzzled by this, it then dawns on me what’s been happening. Changed by routine and don’t put the watch anywhere near my phone and all is well with both phones. Seems like the cell phone cover with its magnetic clasp affects the watch. I remember reading this in the dose and don’t when I got my recent watch. I’m happy now.
Magnets don’t damage computers, in and of themselves. They *can* damage magnetic media like floppies and hard drives (but not SSDs), and they can also damage CRT-based monitors in certain circumstances. But a machine that doesn’t have any of those things -for example, phones- can be around most magnets without any problems.
Technically, a really strong magnetic pulse can damage even solid-state electronics. But you’re not likely to encounter magnets strong enough to cause that kind of damage in everyday life.
They don’t normally, strong alternating magnetic fields can damage hard drives or floppy drives or tape drives.. but they have to be pretty strong and close.
You know what a magnetron is don’t you?
Ugh something that kills the Greco?
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