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:Not exactly new

[arodland]

The boot on my power adapter is NINE INCHES and RIBBED FOR YOUR PLEASURE. Oh yeah.

Really are no facts in this article.

[catwh0re]

The author really doesn't seem to be speaking much truth at all, I'd be inclined to think this isn't even a true story, if this actually happened he wouldn't sit and write a few paragraphs about fire safety, when he could be getting all new hardware from apple for nothing.

His "facts" are outright wrong in either the positive or negative sense. First of all the materials are fire safe, as required by construction standards, fire retardent plastic is used. Secondly if you do decide to go spark happy on the unit, it will shut down, and auto reset when unplugged for a small amount of time. On the flip side, Apple -have- had battery + fire issues, similar to Dell. The exception being that there has been no doubt at all that apple didn't jump right into a battery recall once this happened, which is in contrast to Dell where there is suspicion they left it for a little while to see if it was an isolated incident.

On the other hand 24.5V is almost nothing to worry about especially with such a low current.

A final point to be made is how is his power adapter being used such that it's close enough to burn his powerbook... while I'm not one for strict policy, they do actually tell you to unwind the cable fully before use. (no one likes a magnetic field mmkay.)