My 2015 MacBook Pro Retina Exploded

After much insisting (30-40minutes) they finally agreed to take the battery and keep it in their safe for a week, until the first available genius appointment was available. There they said it was out of warranty as its a disposable part and therefore not covered by the AppleCare+ plan I had at the time. Genuinely it was the worst experience I've had in an apple store to date.

Beautiful line here.

> Would this article be getting the same traction if it wasn't a MacBook?

This.

There was a huge amount of attention, which included the things being banned on aircraft, for Samsung's fire-prone phones. Before that, it was "hoverboards." I think the answer is yes, it would.

No, but then Apple often invites it by continuing to claim it's s#1t doesn't stink.

Technically all that really confirms is that they take the PR/image aspect of safety seriously. May have been more a CYA than anything else. Yes, cynical view, I know.

After a short conversation with a tier-2 support person, they agreed to replace the battery for free. They were also willing to replace the keyboard and bottom case, if there were any permanent deformations (there weren't). I took it in to my local Apple Store and they had it back to me in 48 hours.

I'm sure this is a YMMV issue, so the best lesson is perhaps to call several times until you get a good answer.

I don't think that's strange. Here in N/W Europe, warranties are quite good. However warranty on consumables such as batteries is only 6 months.

My thinking about what your Mac is doing is in line with rsynnott, it might be based on your battery's current charge capacity vs. its original capacity, I'm more inclined to think the message is triggered by your battery's cycle count. You can find all this information in the System Information application, under Power.

How is merely turning off a warning?

How would the user tell it from a random glitch with power, battery disconnect, etc?

Europe (UK, Ireland, Italy, and Iceland): Separate tray every time I've passed through in the last 4 years.

I guess I'll never be able to do that.

If it did indeed recognize the heat problem and turn itself off, they should likely either tell the user or not allow it to turn back on until it cools down.

I'm not sure this is what actually happened, anyway. He says it caught fire within a few seconds of being turned back on. Either the thermal protection is faulty (it should shut off before the battery gets anywhere near that point) or the machine shut off for some other reason (excessive CPU temperature, say).

Which is exactly what anyone else would do if their laptop suddenly shut off without giving any clear warning that the situation was dangerous. A proper safety system would need to notify the user of the possibility of a battery fire and advise them to take the laptop somewhere where fire damage would be minimized.

But it's not entirely clear to me that safety features were actually triggered. Perhaps the battery failed and the machine shut down due to lack of power or a power fluctuation. The fire could have been inevitable at that point, and his actions after the shutdown and before the fire are just red herrings.

I think this comes from a lack of understanding about how the problem started. Yes, excessive heat CAN cause a critical battery condition, but this seems unlikely, as the batteries should be designed to handle much more heat than the CPU can generate. Rather, I think the batteries caused the heat, not the other way around.

The firmware on my PC will detect that it is running too hot, and halt. Presumably it will halt to catch fire since it seems as though the only thermal management at that point are the fans, but that is another story.

In my experience Apple is not consistently good about dealing with this. In every case, I've ultimately been able to get the battery replaced at no cost to me, but with an iPhone 6 that started swelling about a year ago, pushing the screen out, phone support told me flatly that this wasn't something that could possibly happen with such a new device, and suggested that I try to make a Genius Bar appointment on my own. When I brought the phone into the store later that day, they replaced it on the spot, with no appointment. (I wasn't going to accept carrying around a time bomb for another week or more.)

https://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html

IIRC, Macbooks do not have vents on the bottom to be blocked in that way. The only vents on mine are on the hinge between the screen and the body, and the mechanism works so that the could really only be blocked from the top.

No one has done a real root cause analysis and research shows humans are really bad at it when relying on intuition alone.

Cascading failure here is possible. I've never seen one actually light a battery on fire. The last encounter was a gaming level video card plowing a capacitor, starting a fire within the entire desktop.

From the article:

> If you have a MacBook be careful leaving it unattended on the bed, battery fires burn hot and fast with little time to react.

If this person was in a habit of leaving it in a poorly ventilated place, like their squishy bed, the electronics could have become compromised over time.

Also from the article:

> however with the newer unibody laptops there is no way you can see this swelling happening.

This is not true. Users have reported that prior to discovering battery swelling, their trackpad quit working and in some cases began separating from the top chassis.

Actually, the touch pad tends to pop up when the batteries start swelling. It may not have in this case, but it's common enough that people get _some_ warning.

You own a vehicle?

To me, that has to do with slimness.