Remember a few months back when Apple announced its new “affordable” smartwatch, the Apple Watch SE? At the time, it sounded like a fantastic idea. The power, efficiency and usefulness of a traditional Apple Watch but condensed in size sounded like a great move for folks desperate to strap an Apple product to their wrist and show it off to all their friends. Well, it turns out that sometimes our wishes are granted by a monkey’s paw. While the Apple Watch SE is a neat little gadget, it is apparently overheating to a rather frightening extent.
Users in South Korea have taken to social media, in particular Reddit, to share pictures of their overheated Apple Watch SEs. The images seem to show the OLED display being burnt out and all the cases reported indicate that the watch had been used for several hours before the user began to feel an uncomfortable heat on their wrists. There’s a mixture of both GPS and GPS with Cellular watches in the mix, with no consistency between the colours.
According to a description of one of the cases mentioned on Reddit, “The owner received the product on October 8. The owner slept with the watch on the wrist on October 9 night. Woke up on October 10 just to find the wrist is very hot. The owner quickly took off the watch to find the red wrist due to heat. No power signals from the watch, but the sound plays well when the watch is searched with the Find my Watch feature. The owner exchanged the device with a new product on October 16.”
Source: Reddit
So what’s up with the Apple Watch SE in South Korea?
The weird thing is that all the reported complaints have come out of South Korea. It’s strange that the issue would be isolated to a very specific region. One explanation is that a faulty run of the Apple Watch SE could have made its way into the country. It would certainly explain how all reported devices seem to be malfunctioning in the same area, that being the top right corner of the watch. Obviously having a hideous burn mark on the face of your Apple Watch SE isn’t ideal, so here’s hoping this is a problem isolated to Korea and nowhere else in the world.
There’s been no word from Apple about this but we’re sure the company is looking into the issue and helping those who may have suffered from it. Fortunately, no-one was actually burnt by the devices but we imagine that a replacement is probably in order.
(Source: MacRumors)