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Macbook caught fire. - With happy ending!

mixel said:
:D A MBP is much more suitable for Kat's general usage as she collects things at an alarming rate, and the SSD wouldn't be big enough to even store all the stuff from her previous drive. (it's to be her soul machine as well as for business stuff).. Personally I'd have preferred an Air too but that’s just me, hehe.

Even a refurb Macbook would've done the job though - i really wasn’t expecting this quality of treatment despite what people were suggesting in the thread. I'm really glad I posted here in the first place. Silver linings are always good.
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They are giving you 13" MBP with SSD Setup? you can alway stake it out and replace it with a HDD or get a Optical Drive Caddy to throw in a second HDD. but thats amazing how well they are taking care of you even after 5 years, Apple realy stands behind its products.
 
Satnam1989 said:
They are giving you 13" MBP with SSD Setup? you can alway stake it out and replace it with a HDD or get a Optical Drive Caddy to throw in a second HDD. but thats amazing how well they are taking care of you even after 5 years, Apple realy stands behind its products.
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Oh, no.. They're giving us the base level 13" MBP configuration with a 500GB HDD, I mentioned how SSD wouldn't be suitable because Kilamite said he'd have preferred a MBA. 500GB is perfect.

But yeah +1 to Apple support! I hope the remains of the laptop/battery are useful to them and getting to the bottom of how it could've happened, it just seems like a charred mess to me and having it left outside in the wet until it stopped smoking probably doesn’t help them do their CSI bit on it either. :) (better that than it being in the house though, obviously)
 
That's Great News

mixel said:
The engineer didn't call back but the same supervisor did. I guess the engineer looked at the photos and S/Ns and confirmed it was legit.

They asked me to wrap it up and drop it off at my nearest certified Apple service centre - and Apple are sending us a new 13" Macbook Pro.

So that's something incredibly positive from all this at least. I'm pretty flabbergasted by how great Apple have been with it all. It's been dropped off, now I'm just waiting.

Here's a funny photo of the charred Macbook outline it left on our stone steps outside. (the pink is chalk, not battery related)

update: he called back to confirm a MBP was ok with me and I'll get an email about delivery of the replacement within the next couple of days. :D
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And I'm glad Apple have been so good over this, but I'm not surprised. I had a faulty ATV unit a while back, and they ended up sending me a free one. Not as dramatic a story as yours though.

When you get the details about the cause of the fire, would you be kind enough to let us know here?
 
wow that's realy scary! I'm glad no real harm was done and it worked out in the end.

It also sounds very familiar as I still use a 1.1(2006) macbook myself and put it to sleep when not in use on my desk. However I keep mine plugged in. I too had the battery replaced by apple shortly after the recall. I think it might have been on the S/N list as well. Also the recall may have been due to batteries prematurely dying after very few load cycles which is what happened to my original. There's some info on it here:
http://www.apple.com/support/macbook_macbookpro/batteryupdate/

These days my macbook is used solely as a desktop since the built in display went out a few months ago. It stays connected to my external monitor, keyboard, mouse on my desk all the time now. I recently discovered by accident that if i cut power off to my macbook with the power adapter still plugged into the macbook will shutoff instead of switching over to battery power. Also noticed it says the battery needs service. I'm probably just going to pull the battery from my macbook and use it without the battery to avoid the risk of fire.
 
That sounds wise to me! If you don't need the battery, I'd run it without for peace of mind. Only wih these old potentially wonky ones though. My brother has a MBP he runs like that after the battery expanded and the screen got really dim. Early intel macs seem more fragile than the older and newer models!?

The replacement arrived on Friday and it took a couple of hours to transfer things from melty HDD. Kat's really happy with it but she's still not really sleeping. :( at least she has a (comparitively) super fast machine now! Statistically the chance of something like this happening twice to the same family seem non-existent, so that's something!
 
TellHer To Rest Easy

mixel said:
That sounds wise to me! If you don't need the battery, I'd run it without for peace of mind. Only wih these old potentially wonky ones though. My brother has a MBP he runs like that after the battery expanded and the screen got really dim. Early intel macs seem more fragile than the older and newer models!?

The replacement arrived on Friday and it took a couple of hours to transfer things from melty HDD. Kat's really happy with it but she's still not really sleeping. :( at least she has a (comparitively) super fast machine now! Statistically the chance of something like this happening twice to the same family seem non-existent, so that's something!
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As you say, it was an older machine, I re-calibrated the battery on my Pro yesterday, and I'm not having sleepless nights...Have Apple told you anything about what might have been the cause?
 
Nope, but I'm guessing a (obviously significant, haha) manufacturing defect and I'm not sure they're going to openly admit to that for liability reasons? Must happen to every company occasionally though. Going to try not to dwell on what might have been. :)

A few people we've spoken to want us to sue etc, but that's not really us. If there had been injury/property damage then yeah.. But as it is, Apple have done a good job with a bad situation.
 
mixel said:
I'm not sure that applies to the earliest revisions. I know the unibodies use a little battery power even when plugged in so it makes sense they have to slow down. I don't have a MacBook 1,1 to test it on anymore though obviously. :D
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I don't want to scare you, but the smoke from a Li-ion battery failure is highly, highly toxic. If anyone breathed even a tiny bit of it, get them checked over.

If not, enjoy the MBP, the i5 processor is a huge upgrade :)
 
mixel said:
Nope, but I'm guessing a (obviously significant, haha) manufacturing defect and I'm not sure they're going to openly admit to that for liability reasons? Must happen to every company occasionally though. Going to try not to dwell on what might have been. :)

A few people we've spoken to want us to sue etc, but that's not really us. If there had been injury/property damage then yeah.. But as it is, Apple have done a good job with a bad situation.
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I'm glad to hear that you aren't going to sue. Too many people go nuts with this kind of stuff. Their product broke, it's years old, and you got a pretty sweet upgrade out of the deal. Didn't even lose the contents of your HD.

I think this is a great story--thanks for sharing!
 
Montymitch said:
I'm glad to hear that you aren't going to sue. Too many people go nuts with this kind of stuff. Their product broke, it's years old, and you got a pretty sweet upgrade out of the deal. Didn't even lose the contents of your HD.

I think this is a great story--thanks for sharing!
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I completely agree. It's really refreshing to see someone take a road less traveled like this. :)
 
Montymitch said:
I'm glad to hear that you aren't going to sue. Too many people go nuts with this kind of stuff. Their product broke, it's years old, and you got a pretty sweet upgrade out of the deal. Didn't even lose the contents of your HD.

I think this is a great story--thanks for sharing!
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Thanks (both). :)

I can see the other perspective too though obviously. This could have been traumatic to some people had it happened to them, and if so I think they'd have a right to sue if it was really messing with their head, feeling of security and ability to sleep etc. We've been through nastier stuff than this (a break-in a few years ago) but "broke" is a very light way of describing spontaneous combustion, haha. It really is only luck that it wasn't much worse.

But regardless, it wasn't much worse so it makes a good story, and Kat is very happy with her new machine. :D
 
mixel said:
I'm not sure that applies to the earliest revisions. I know the unibodies use a little battery power even when plugged in so it makes sense they have to slow down. I don't have a MacBook 1,1 to test it on anymore though obviously. :D
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The slow CPU speed applies to all the Apple Intel laptops. That document has been around for a long time and hasn't been updated since 2008.
 
I am surprised they didn't offer you the highest specification, not that you should be greedy, but thats ridiculous. Did they like offer you a case or soemthing?
 
chrfr said:
The slow CPU speed applies to all the Apple Intel laptops. That document has been around for a long time and hasn't been updated since 2008.
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Ah ok then. That's good to know at least. :) Maybe people running their ooold intel laptops with ropey batteries as desktop replacements should fit a smoke alarm above their desks or something just in case. That way they keep the performance without worrying about battery accidents.

ERIC273: I got the feeling I could've held out and asked for a much better model, but we didn't really have any need for it. They didn't offer a case or anything, no. Its worth pointing out though that at no point in the process did I specifically ask for a replacement laptop (i would have done before agreeing to send the remains for them to examine though).. They did that of their own volition. All our carry cases, sleeves and stuff from the 13" MB work on the MBP anyway so we didn't need extra freebies. :)
 
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