Chosen Solution
This actually spans multiple devices, Watch (Series 2 & 3), iPhone 7 & 8, Apple Pencil. Starting back in a couple of years ago, I got an Apple Watch Series 2. I loved it, amazing product and great compliment to my iPhone 7 Plus. However… It died a few days after I had it, this happened at work. Fast Forward. Apple had replaced the watch over 12 times. Yes, 12. After a couple of different stores worked with me, one store manager took everything back and gave me full credit plus a nice discount on an iPad Pro, I gave up on the watch. I purchased a Pencil for my ipad and when I brought it into work, guess what. That failed. I exchanged the pencil and I leave it at home. A friend got me a Series 3 as a Christmas gift. I wore it for not even a week. Guess what? Yep, it died after a couple of days at work. And now I have 2 coworkers who are also suffering from some issues. 1 had several watches fail and then her iPhone 7 Plus failed. All with the same behavior. Sudden loss of connection, time would move faster, eventually a complete failure to where the device (Watch or Phone) would not power back on. I spoke with some friends of various degrees of tech knowledge, from A+ bench techs to Platform Engineers & Computer Science degrees. Plus some simple math says the common device among the three are the Bluetooth radios? I work for a small electronic manufacturing company. We basically assemble components and various sensor products. Quite a bit of soldering. No massive equipment other than PC’s, Multimeeters, a CryoStat in our lab next door, but no heavy magnets and there’s more EMF interference from desk fans. Apple Support hasn’t been much help, other than constantly replacing the products. Any ideas? Someone did mention they worked in a plant with lots of solder/flux equipment and it messed with bluetooth radios. We don’t have a lot of BT devices, a few headsets maybe but nowhere near extreme levels. Does it sound logical that the BT radio inside Apple products would fire back so hard and break them this way?
Frankly. I’d contact the EPA . They may have a lot more experience with this. Also, whatever is killing your devices. may be killing you. https://www.epa.gov
Not sure if this is still bothering you, but you might have seen this blog post about Helium “killing” iPhones from October: iphones are allergic to helium Could that be the same for your Apple Watch and Pencil case?
I think both @mayer and me are thinking the flux vapors and what else you have going on in the air is the issue here. The fumes can be corrosive (Acetic acid in the flux) so over time it can eat into exposed surfaces damaging them. From what you’ve stated I can’t see RF signals being the issue here. You would need an electromagnetic pulse to damage the transmitters in any radio system (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc…) I’ve not done any testing on how much of a pulse or what frequencies one would need to kill Bluetooth, so its possible Bluetooth is more sensitive than the others. Here’s a person subjecting an iPhone to a EMP pulse: Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) an IPhone - What Happens? We don’t know if Bluetooth or WiFi still worked afterwards as unlike the rest of the phone the antennas are exposed outside of the Faraday Cage shield of the metal case, or in your case the AppleWatch its self. Here’s a method of EMP measure: Methods for High Power EM Pulse Measurement
