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The reason we don’t see exploding battery attacks more often is not because it’s technically hard, it’s because the erosion of public trust in everyday things isn’t worth it.
(www.bunniestudios.com)
edit: after 20 comments, i'm adding a post description here, since most of the commenters so far appear not to be reading the article:
This is about how surprisingly cheap it is (eg $15,000) to buy a complete production line to be able to manufacture batteries with a layer of nearly-undetectable explosives inside of them, which can be triggered by off-the-shelf devices with only their firmware modified.
It's not just the batteries, you need a way to blow them up remotely and reliably.
This wasn't just some wonky batteries shoved into legit devices. This was an entire operation to make fake pagers and walkie talkies. The batteries were probably the only legit things in them.
Fortunately these are simple devices that you can probably replicate the guts of with a few dollars of off the shelf parts. You're not going to be able to fake an iPhone like this. Cheaper to just drop bombs at that point. And tbh, if it was something expensive like an iPhone, Hezbollah wouldn't have bought a thousand of them.