What you should not do:
Experts have for years pointed out that’s a bad idea – and now Apple is officially warning users not to do it.
“Don’t put your iPhone in a bag of rice. Doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone,” the company says in a recent support note spotted by Macworld. Along with the risk of damage, testing has suggested uncooked rice is not particularly effective at drying the device.
What you should do:
If your phone isn’t functioning at all, turn it off right away and don’t press any buttons. The next steps depend on your specific circumstances, but broadly speaking: dry it with a towel and put it in an airtight container packed with silica packets if you have them. Don’t charge it until you’re sure it’s dry.
Just pick up one of these:
I was almost convinced the answer was going to be “buy a new iphone”
Stop putting your wet iPhone in rice, says Apple. Instead buy a new one because we make repairing it artificially expensive by restricting the manufactures from selling parts and we just replace the whole motherboard every time!
Last I heard Apple won’t even do out of warranty repair work if the device is water damaged. They just tell you to buy a new one.
How exactly do small particles of rice damage a cell phone? I can’t think of any realistic way for that to happen
The same way the water does; by causing shorts.
Except that rice is an insulator and has no physical way to get to anything electrical to begin with.
It’s not necessarily the rice itself doing anything, but dirt and particulates on the rice which are conductive and small enough to get inside the device.
If your phone is wet, then it’s already been soaked in a conductive material. Putting it in a bowl of dry rice isn’t going to hurt anything.
Water will dry; dirt and shit won’t evaporate if it gets inside the device.
What sort of conductive dirt are we talking about?
Do you believe that dirt is made up of a single substance? There are salts and metals in dirt.
For years, I’ve saved every silica packet in a coffee can. I stopped a while ago since I have a liter of them and the can is full.
Works great for drying things out.
I realize this is the advice in the article but wanted to point out that they build up quickly and come in just about everything that isn’t food these days.
You know that they’ve been absorbing moisture from the air since they were put in with the thing you got them with, right? So by the time you use them for this they’re saturated. You’d have to bake them to drive off the moisture and seal them to prevent them from absorbing more.
Not that any of this is particularly helpful for electronics with water in them. The damage comes from minerals dissolved in the water being deposited when the water evaporates, which causes shorts. You’d really have to rinse the board with distilled water or preferably isopropyl alcohol.
