The watch has a tiny battery that does not have the capacity to instantly increase the temperature to the point one gets burned before you could take it off. Thermal runaway would at least take minutes where the watch would slowly go from warm to hot to burning hot where you would have 3rd degree burns.
I don’t think I would rule it out; it’s not hard to imagine, for example, seawater incursion causing a short that got really dramatic really quickly. (That we don’t have any significant reports of this tells us that Apple has protected the devices really well against this sort of thing — but it doesn’t mean it’s
a priori impossible.)
But one can be as certain as certain gets that the watch would be obviously dead as a result. Not only would it not turn on, there would be unmistakable damage to the case. There would have been nasty smells that would probably linger, and it would very likely “let go of the magic smoke.”
There is absolutely no plausible scenario whatsoever in which the watch gets hot enough to cause a thermal burn yet the watch remains operational.
Again, there are all sorts of scenarios in which a burn-like sore results from wearing any sort of bracelet, especially a tight-fitting one. And, in plenty of those scenarios, the wound builds gradually enough that one only becomes aware of it suddenly. One may legitimately perceive something like this as “the thing suddenly burned me.” And a medical professional absolutely needs to hear that perspective to make a good diagnosis and should take it seriously.
But it’s just as important to recognize that this was not the watch overheating, even if it very well might have seemed like it.
As an analogy, consider a migraine. The sufferer really does see flashing lights, but that doesn’t mean that there’s an actual lightbulb that’s flashing. The perception is real, but the perception is not (in this case) a reliable indicator of an objective external phenomenon.
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