Dangerous Apple Power Adapters?

An anonymous reader writes "Even with all these exploding Dell notebooks and other notebook safety problems, Apple has seemed relatively immune. Every once in a while, some odd thing came along, but it seemed like relatively calm waters. Not anymore — Apple's notebook power adapters appear to be the source of some serious safety concerns. Every iBook and PowerBook user should read this and keep a close eye on their adapter — the adapters suffer from very poor design including wires that seem prone to short out and burn and zero short circuit protection."

Comments

Re:Here are some technical details:

[v1]

Just a technical addendum. The white bricks are no longer produced in the 45w range. All new white bricks are 65w. This is most likely because the latter g3/4 laptops were all requiring more power than the early G3s. The 65's work fine on all the older equipment, (watts are drawn on demand, a 65 won't hurt a machine that took a 45 originally) so we just carry the 65's. I have replaced maybe five white packs that had the wire broken at the strain relief where this fellow had the problem, and as many more where the wire went at the DC jack end. Apple does need to improve the strain relief at both ends. I find OP's claim that there was "no visible damage before the fire" to be laughable. When I look at the picture I note immediately, the wire always comes straight out of the pack when it's new, and there is a good inch of cord needed to bend it 90 degrees without excessive force. But when you look at the picture, the wire is almost emerging at 90 degrees right out of the strain relief. Good money says he tends to plug the pack into the wall a long way from his ibook, and the cord is always being strained and pulled hard to the side, and was a direct cause of the cord damage and the fire.

Also of note, the "ufo" power adapters that shipped originally on the ibook G3s are much much worse. They are known for failure where the DC cord meets the computer plug and where the AC cord meets the connector that plugs into the pack. We have replaced many of them for failure at one of these two points. Though for all the macs I've worked on, I have yet to encounter a single apple pack that caught fire. This sounds like an isolated incident and someone trying to make a whole lot of noise, stomping about and shouting "defect, recall, save me!"

Given 50,000 production units of electronics, a couple of them are going to be bad. There is no escaping that. And yes, one of them might burn down your house. But a meteor might hit it first, and has roughly the same odds, OP needs to get over it.

Though I don't deny he needs to post about it, because this is how you find out about real issues. Now if we saw a dozen "me too" followups immediately we might want to look into this more, but right now we just have a blowhard.