I remember when I was growing up (decades ago), my dad instilled in me to never put a magnet up to a computer or TV because they would cause irreparable damage to the screen. While I’m sure that SOMEWHERE out in the world there’s a magnet strong enough to cause damage if given enough time or whatever, but in terms of what I can buy from a store, would it be safe to keep my cell phone and a magnet (say, one of those ‘clicking’ fidget toys with half a dozen or so small magnets) in the same pocket, or am I just asking for trouble?
Edit: Thank you everyone for all your answers! I now know far more than I expected to from this silly question 😁
I have a phone case with a giant neodymium magnet in it. I’ve had it for a few years now. Everything works fine except the Samsung S-pen. When you try to use it you can see the influence the magnet has on your writing and positioning.
A magnet on a old CRT TV would distort the colors and image in cool ways along the magnetic field. Nothing permanent unless you left it there for a long ass time. Ahh memories…
and then you pressed the DEGAUSS button! schwing!!!
I can still hear the noise.
The damage magnets did to the old CRT TVs was pretty much reversible.
The damage they do to modern LCD screens is irreversible. But it’s also way smaller than they did to CRTs. The damage they do by strongly snapping pieces of metal around is irreversible too. But if it’s a toy, the magnets are probably not strong enough to damage anything.
You’re probably fine.
The reason you didn’t wanted magnets near technology before is because we relied on magnetic fields for stuff, so magnets distorted those uses. Nowadays we usually don’t have any magnetic parts on a phone, so unless you have a super strong magnet extremely close to the electronics you should be fine.
Specifically CRT monitors were tiny particle accelerators that shot electrons to a coat of phosphorescent material, they used magnets to redirect the electrons to hit the correct pixels at the right time. So putting a magnet nearby would pull the beam in a different direction distorting the image and shifting it’s colors (because the electrons were now hitting different color pixels). It was not irreversible, usually removing the magnet is all you had to do, but sometimes you might have magnetized something and the beam would remain crooked for a while.
The other thing that would be affected by magnets were hard disks, your PC might still have one so you might not want to put magnets near it, but our phone doesn’t. HDs stored information using magnetic fields into a disk, similar to a DVD except using a tiny needle that would magnetize the disk in one direction to write a 1 and on the opposite to write a 0. Taking a magnet near that would essentially erase all of the data in that disk. Modern storage use very different methods for storing data that don’t depend on magnetism, so you’re fine.
Not the absolute answer you look for but my phone’s cover is held shut by a magnet.
