flaming iBook
Dell eat your heart out: Apple even has a wow factor when they self destruct! this is the storyof the flaming iBook, heres a pic.
Looks like something out of Inspector Gadget or the old Mission Impossible TV show... "this iBook will self-destruct"
Looks like something out of Inspector Gadget or the old Mission Impossible TV show... "this iBook will self-destruct"
Comments
I've never seen a lithium battery catch fire, but that seems a bit extreme to me. And they just happened to have a camera ready and had the presence of mind to use it before trying to extinguish the fire? iDunno....
Picture does not fit the story...fake? Probably.
plus, it seems to be sitting on a hard concrete floor. if that was caught as a candid shot it sure is a lot of coicidences. although i wouldn't rule out an ibook or powerbook catching fire since they use essentially the same batteries as the already explosive sony vaios and dell laptops.
OK well a lot of people are being real stupid about this:
You have a burning object in your living room. WHAT DO YOU DO?
Personally, I'd throw it outside, ESPECIALLY if I were going to take a picture.
So they throw it outside, the problem is solved.. now what? Hey, they could take a picture for their homeowner's insurance before they actually put it out.
For now, this makes a lot more sense than a burning laptop being captured on camera indoors. Who the hell would take a picture before putting it out if it was burning your house down?
That looks too cool to be real.
Haha, stole my post, that looks fucking AWESOME!
1. Concrete floor (if it was trown outsude why is it still plugged in to the power)
2. Quality of photograph, no way someone who had just had their ibook explode could throw it outside, get a camera, take the shot and still get it in the process of what loks like an explosion.
3. APRIL..... why have we not seen this pic before ?
The picture is real but staged.
nice try DELL :-)
J.
OK well a lot of people are being real stupid about this:
You have a burning object in your living room. WHAT DO YOU DO?
Personally, I'd throw it outside, ESPECIALLY if I were going to take a picture.
So they throw it outside, the problem is solved.. now what? Hey, they could take a picture for their homeowner's insurance before they actually put it out.
For now, this makes a lot more sense than a burning laptop being captured on camera indoors. Who the hell would take a picture before putting it out if it was burning your house down?
who the hell picks up an exploding laptop before trying to put it out? is your couch more valuable to you than your hands?
who the hell picks up an exploding laptop before trying to put it out? is your couch more valuable to you than your hands?
obviously, the laptop is on fire, and not exploding.
you could grab it by the screen and throw it out. that would explain the power cord, too (think about it, you toss it outside half-hazardly... you may forget to unplug the thing).
Yes, someone could've set the thing on fire, but that seems unlikely. Maybe it's a staged photo from dell
http://wcco.com/consumer/local_story_148150249.html
Laptop Fires Prompt Battery Recalls
Image
David Schechter
Reporting
(WCCO) Nick Brown, 11, was playing on his Apple iBook laptop about one month ago when, like most children, he got distracted and left the room.
His mom, Cindy Brown, explains what happened next. "My husband and I were in the other room, heard a popping noise, came out and the room was filled with smoke," she said.
Heat from the laptop, which was lying on the floor, had started melting the carpet. The Browns quickly carried it outside.
Dave Brown grabbed his camera. His pictures show flames shooting from the lower right hand corner of the laptop. The area around the lower right side is blackened immediately.
More pictures show the laptop continuing to burn, eventually causing large flames to shoot out of it. Eventually, the laptop is melted to the Browns' patio.
"I mean, it was five minutes and (the computer) was in flames," Cindy Brown said. "The computer burst into flames. It doesn't seem real that you would have a fire in a computer. We all could have died, and the house could have burned down."
The latter of Brown's concerns has happened.
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a fire that burned a two-story apartment complex in Mississippi in November 2005 was caused by a laptop.
In 2004, the Commission received a report of a laptop fire in a kindergarten room in Houston. The same year, a laptop fire severely burned a woman in her dorm in New York.
Reports show a hotel bed ignited and caused a room to catch fire in Warren, Mich. in November 2005. In March, a laptop in a laboratory caught fire and burned the desk where it was located in Ames, Iowa.
These incidents are among the 43 reported incidents in the last two years. Nick Brown's computer makes 44.
Staring at his computer and shaking his head, Nick Brown said, "I don't know why it caught fire."
In 2004 and 2005, Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard collectively recalled more than 300,000 laptop batteries "due to fire hazards."
"The vast influx of these devices into the home and into the office creates the opportunity for a very large problem," security consultant Scott Rynd said.
Rynd is one of many industry insiders who say the problem focuses on lithium ion batteries.
As computers get smaller, so do the lithium ion batteries. Rynd says the batteries are getting over-packed with power and overheating.
Rynd and other insiders say the demand for laptops is also increasing as the prices go down, so the big computer companies are now buying batteries overseas.
As American computer makers are left to recall the imported batteries, two questions remain:
1) Are they acting quickly enough?
"(Computer companies) are not actively covering up the issues," Rynd said. "They are not taking out full-page ads in the New York times to publicize the problem."
2) Are the computer makers recalling enough?
The battery in the Brown's computer is not on Apple's recall list -- at least, not yet.
"This could happen again to someone else," Cindy Brown said. "Had we not been in the room, our house would have started on fire. I mean, we could have been asleep. It's just very frightening to think what could have happened."
The Browns' case is now under investigation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Dell and Apple gave us a "no comment" for this story. Hewlett Packard did not return our calls.
Patti Davis, a spokesperson with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said the agency is following the situation.
Davis said there have been a lot of recalls. She said lithium ion batteries do have a lot of energy and can potentially cause injury.
The agency recommends paying close attention to computer company manuals.
Computers are not the only devices that use lithium ion batteries. Several other small portable devices, such as cell phones, also use the technology. They too have been part of recalls due to fire hazards.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I was totally right, people who disagreed with me were wrong, and Onlooker eats babies.
"OMG THE LAPTOP IS SMOKING!"
*Dad walks over and just picks it up roughly and runs out to someplace safer (patio of course, it's concrete) Plug went with it because it's not magsafe so if he picks it up vertically the cord would catch with it.
The ibook browns and slowly begins to flame, they even said it took about 5 minutes before it reached full inferno, plenty of time to have a family member grab their digital camera and begin snapping pictures.