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Comment by xvolter | Hacker News Reader

Are they aware that "Surgical‑grade stainless steel" means extremely cheap? Surgical‑grade stainless steel is designed to be single-use. They advertise their phone as having steel that is good enough to use once?

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgical_stainless_steel

> There is no formal definition on what constitutes a "surgical stainless steel", so product manufacturers and distributors apply the term to refer to any grade of corrosion resistant steel.

Define "use". I've had a steel rod in my leg for 14 years now. I use my leg to walk more than I use my phone.

Single-use if we bury you with it. Unless you're being cremated... then all your metal parts are like prizes or something for the cremators.

But yeah, I think "surgical" is used the way we used to say "space age plastics" and such.

"Surgical‑grade stainless steel" doesn't mean anything. AFAICT, there's not certification or metal grading committee that says, "yes, you can call that 'Surgical‑grade stainless steel'. Accept no substitutes."

Beside, we're making phones, not doing surgery. What is that even supposed to mean to me the phone consumer? I understand that I'm supposed to think "better" because "surgical", but for all I know the standards aren't all that high because it just needs to be sharp, not durable.

IOW, it's just marketing, just like "military-grade encryption".

maybe you can cut yourself on it because it's made for surgeons and they just wanna raise awareness that their product is not that safe for careless consumers?

It's just marketing BS. Like the "Bionic" chip. It doesn't officially mean anything, but it sounds cool.

I mean if they want to use a corrosion resistant metal that sounds fancy they should have gone with Monel. It's very hard and tough, corrosion resistant, and the name even sounds fancy and expensive. It also has a nice look when machined.

Aren't surgery tools supposed to last years of use?

Sterilizing surgical tools is extremely expensive, and not good enough. You can sterilize some tools, for some purposes, but usually that doesn’t remove all contaminants.

So surgical tools are instead produced for single time use, and after that recycled, to ensure they’re always sterile.

EDIT: For example, with scalpels, you can remove and replace the blade, and do exactly that after every use. Removing and replacing the blade looks like this: https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-dc86caa627022bbfb7e6b4...

What? Can't you just throw them in an autoclave?

You can remove some contaminants in an autoclave, but others surprisingly survive, and would contaminate the next patient.

So stuff like scalpels, for example, is recycled after every single use.

Even such simple things as prions actually already require far more complicated autoclaves than you’d expect.

I would expect prions to be harder to sterilize than bacteria, actually. Prions aren't even alive.

They are much harder to sterilize, and autoclaves don't work. Ideally you'd dispose all tools exposed to prions, but if that's infeasible, the CDC recommends an autoclave in a bath of NaOH.

https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cjd/infection-control.html

I would also expect that you want scalpels to be sharp as new on each use. The blade probably doesn't take too kindly to the sterilizing conditions.

Many surgical items are reused - for example scissors, and retractors. Surgeons may have their own set of tools that they continue to use.

Lower cost items are not reused (a scalpel, which might simply be a piece of plastic attached to a blade).

Yeah, isn't this what an autoclave is for?

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