Boy. Laptops seem to be exploding like crazy nowadays. This image from June at a conference in Osaka:

I have to admit that my laptop gets pretty hot (and my old Powerbook used to get hotter), but that’s the CPU–and it’s not the CPU that’s exploding in these reports. It’s the batteries. And the laptop maker at the focus of all this attention, fairly or not, is Dell.

Apparently, Dell has known about this issue for a long time–although CU reported that Dell only knew of three cases in 2005 when the company recalled 22,000 laptop batteries, it is now reported that Dell was aware of dozens of fires. And despite the recall, laptops continue to burn–some quite dramatically:

In all fairness, Dell is not the only laptop maker with these problems. Unfortunately, Powerbooks are blazing away with a fair level of frequency as well.

I wish I could imagine my own ‘book to be immune from this, but I am in fact rather nervous about it going up into flames. On three different occasions over the past year I’ve had it, I’ve experienced what could have been near-meltdowns. After closing the notebook cover and setting the computer to sleep, I come back–sometimes many hours later–and see that (a) the sleep light is no longer on despite the cover being closed, and (b) the fan is howling like a sonuvagun, obviously blowing at its highest level. When I open the cover, the screen stays dark and the computer refuses to respond. A hard-shutdown and restart brings the computer back on right away–thankfully!–but it takes a bit for the thing to cool down. After I saw these meltdown images, I began to wonder how close I had come to suffering the same thing, even though my own laptop is not on the battery recall list.

Looking at the discussion groups at Apple, though, makes me figure that what I’m seeing isn’t a battery issue, but rather a sleep issue. Probably the computer jostles out of sleep mode while closed and for some reason does not go back to sleep. With the cover down, heat dissipation is probably hindered, causing the overheating.

Nevertheless, I’m having the screen replaced in a week or two (under warranty, even though it ran out last month), and I figure I’ll let the people at Apple know about it just in case.