A warning is good thing, but the drama is less welcome. Blaming Apple is absurd too: the defibrillators have built-in kill switch that responds to strong magnetic fields. At the time where this was designed it was concluded that it is very unlikely for such strong magnetic fields to occur in real life. Well, that assumption is wrong these days.
It is a responsibility of the designers of the medical devices to assure they are safe. Furthermore they naturally have to be replaced every few years, so it isn't even hard to phase out the outdated design in a coordinated fashion. But I guess this costs money and it is cheaper to blame others.
Pacemakers need to be replaced every 5-15 years as the battery wears out [1]. It's not like a visit to the dentist either, it's a major surgery. I also think you underestimate how rapidly a medical device company can make a dramatic change to the design, have it tested and approved, and distributed inside everyday people. Yes it's "coordinated" but the timeline is extremely long compared to how often the phone market is being pumped full of magnets.
For what it's worth I think it's still up to the user to be safe and know what they can and cannot have up against their chest. But to say that the medical community can just be "agile" about this is to really misunderstand how those devices are certified and designed.
> It's not like a visit to the dentist either, it's a major surgery.
My father had a pacemaker, and for long enough to receive a battery swap. The battery for that particular model was implanted under his shoulder blade; the swap-out was performed under local anaesthetic.
The original implantation was a bit more complex from a surgical perspective, requiring keyhole surgery and an angioplasty to run the wire around his heart as well as to implant the battery and controller. But the point is: these devices can be installed and expected to perform for decades, so the engineering design is of necessity highly conservative and has long-term maintenance in mind. It's also safety-critical: if the device malfunctions, people can die.
PS: a pacemaker is not an implanted defibrillator. (Also, my father died in 2017, so what I'm describing is probably a decade or two behind the state of the art.)
Nowhere in my comment did I suggest a timeline for the design change to happen. Yes, it will take years, but it cannot happen at all if the device manufacturers keep blaming others for their poor designs.
And ICD is not a pacemaker. An ICD costs about $30K. When its battery wears out, the battery is replaced, not the ICD. So there will be no replacements of already-implanted ICDs because of this problem.
Also, it is a big deal to redesign an implanted medical device, as it should be. These are not tongue depressors. ICDs are the most tightly regulated device the FDA reviews.
The magnet is usually used as a mitigator to turn off the device in case the device is doing something wrong like producing pulses too fast. There is typically RF communication that can communicate to the device and can often be used to turn the magnet detection off, which means that the device will not quit working when a magnet is detected. This was used in the past for electric trains or other large magnets such as in factories.
Seems to me like both the cell phone maker and the medical device maker want to pass the blame to each other. That said, medical devices should get more leeway here - they already come with warnings, just like medicines too (e.g. don't take with alcohol). When a device is implanted the doctors and the manufacturer pass on the warnings to the patient. However, they obviously can't pass on warnings about future tech that they didn't predict would exist and interfere with their device. In such cases, since Apple's new tech is the one causing the issues, I feel Apple (and other phone manufacturers) need to be more proactive and should publicise and caution the public that their mobile phone may interfere with implanted medical devices.
Blaming Apple is not absurd. The interaction between magnets near the chest and cardiac rhythm devices has been well known since at least the 1980s. Even I can remember a published case report of a person carrying a stereo speaker, and a magnet in the speaker deactivated his ICD.
If Apple were two guys in a garage, you could forgive them. But a trillion dollar company... not so much.
It is a responsibility of the designers of the medical devices to assure they are safe. Furthermore they naturally have to be replaced every few years, so it isn't even hard to phase out the outdated design in a coordinated fashion. But I guess this costs money and it is cheaper to blame others.