Watch Out! Apple's iPhone X leather folio case can kill your credit/debit cards

Apple’s flagship iPhone X is pretty expensive, and so are its official accessories. One such accessory is Apple’s leather folio case (retailing around Rs 8,000) , which not only protects your precious iPhone X but also has a space to hold your banknotes, receipts and credit cards, as noted by Apple itself on their official page.

The case in question employs a neodymium magnet within which controls phone’s screen wakeup and sleep mechanism when the case is opened or closed respectively. In the image you can clearly see the placement of the magnet, which is highlighted by the red square, becomes apparent that the placement of magnet is pretty close to the storage space for your credit/debit cards.

You may have noticed a black stripe on the back of your credit/debit card. It is a collection of tiny magnetic (ferrous) particles which has information recorded on it, defined by how each magnetic particle is aligned on the stripe. Prolonged exposure to an external magnet or magnetic field can throw this information out of place and render the card unreadable.

Experts at Creditcard.com have revalidated our findings. "If you disturb the way that the particles were aligned in the first place by putting a magnet close to it, it will disrupt that encoding," said A. Dean Sherry, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and also associate director of the Rogers Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center.

"It is well known that magnets will wipe out information on credit card stripes," Sherry added. "However, it doesn't always happen after one exposure. It may take several exposures for the card to be deactivated, but it will happen eventually." It isn't the strength of the magnet that's important; it's the duration of exposure. If it's several inches away, there's almost certainly no problem.

While iPhone X’s leather folio case’s magnet does not have a big field, leaving your cards inside the folio for long enough it will slowly demagnetise the card’s strip.

It could be argued that keeping the card slightly above the magnet using the secondary compartment can protect the card from exposure. However, it is best advised that credit/debit cards are not to be kept in this case at all.

While the folio is best suited to protect the expensive display on your super-expensive iPhone, we advise you to store only paper cash or credit cards that have NFC/Chip.