system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Magnets mess up electronics. But how precisely?

I know that in the case of magnetic storage (disk drives, RAM) the magnetic field of the magnet messes up the data stored.

But how do magnets otherwise destroy most electronical devices?
gpt
It's actually fairly difficult for anything other than a remarkably strong magnet to mess up electronics - you can screw with data on magnetically stored medium (RAM, by the way, is electrically stored, and shouldn't be affected by your garden-variety magnetic field). If the magnetic field is sufficiently strong, and either time-variant or you start moving the device around, you can induce a voltage on some of the traces inside, which may just be enough to create sufficient voltage ripple to throw it out of spec and make it behave weirdly. In an extreme circumstances, and with a switched power supply, you can mess with magnetic field generated by the electronics used for energy storage, which is usually finely tuned - throw it off too much, and you can cause the power supply to start throwing out weird voltages (it'd have to be a really big magnet). Lastly, the most visible sign is in LCDs, which use ferrous crystals to either block or allow light - a magnet there will make a dark spot - it usually goes away when you remove the magnet. Don't try it with an LCD you like, though. (it used to be in CRTs you could make a rainbow spot where the magnetic field overpowered the steering field for the electron beam. It would stay there until you degaussed your tv). In short, electronics can be influenced by magnetics, but usually only either in extreme circumstances or with electrical parts that depend on a unperturbed magnetic field.