Battery recall cause for panic? Null says no
By Evan Blass 
posted August 25th 2006 3:05PM
posted August 25th 2006 3:05PM
With all the sensational press about battery recalls and exploding laptops (much of it found right here on these very pages), you might think that your own notebook is a ticking timebomb set to blow at any moment (Qantas sure does). Therefore, many people have been tempted to eject their recalled batteries as quickly as possible and send them off to Dell (and now Apple) before they burst into flames and become fodder for numerous gadget blogs. But is the situation really that urgent? Former Mobile editor-in-chief and current Wired and Yahoo! Tech contributor Christoper Null sat down to do the math, and figured that the odds of your lappy going boom in, say, the next two months, are actually pretty slim. Using the Dell recall as a baseline, Null went in with the assumption that the problem is much worse than the company knows about (or is reporting), and that over the next three years, ten times as many batteries will blow as have already combusted so far. Even in such a pessimistic scenario, the odds of your particular Dell pulling a Dell in the next 60 days (1 in 1,230,000) are far less than the chances that you'll die this year from freezing to death, choking on your own vomit, and even falling out of bed. While you may disagree with Null's numbers and methodology, the point here is clear: there's no real need to panic, and if your notebook hasn't already turned into a charred husk of its former self, you'll probably be okay waiting out the initial flood of returns and sending your battery back in a few weeks. After all, if we let the defective batteries change our way of life, then the defective batteries have already won.
FYI, Apple doesn't require you to return your battery until you receive the new one, so there's no reason to wait to order a replacement.
"After all, if we let the defective batteries change our way of life, then the defective batteries have already won."
[sarcasm]
Don't be foolish. These batteries hate our mobile way of life and the values of data accessability we hold dear and cherish in this society! They're clearly evil and insane - they cannot be reformed nor tolerated.
I'm glad that the President of Dell is refusing to back down to laptop liberals like you and will stay the course in this war against combustion and root out any weapons of mass immolation, especially those from the axis of electronic evil: South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
[/sarcasm] :)
Sure the risk is low, but so is the risk from the flu, but you still get that flu shot every year.
Lithium batteries burn like roman candles when they do short out. The least we could demand from the manufacturers is a relatively safe product at least until the newer lithiums that don't burn like chinese fireworks come out.
Well, my G4 iBook's battery is affected by the recall.
Although that battery has already really declined in life per charge, so that whole battery drama worked out pretty well for me.
His analysis is only based on "publicly reported" incidents of laptops catching fire. These may only be half or even one fourth of all the actual cases, some of which must have been hushed up by Dell while others might not even have been reported to them.
I doubt very much that Dell will go on to make this expensive decision if it wasn't statistically relevant.
For the record, Dell considers a even a handful of incidents among millions of products shipped to be "statistically relevant." We flagged the situation (and everything we knew) to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and worked with them as quickly as possible to effect a voluntary recall. We also commend Apple for doing the right thing.
John, that's commendable if it's true. But we all know that Sony, Dell etc knew about the malfunctioning batteries a long time ago. I also remember reading about a case in Singapore where a customer reported his case and was paid a visit by the _legal_ department from Dell Singapore. His laptop was quickly replaced and he was told not to talk about it.
I completed the dell recall the first day they had it on their site. I got my battery in thursday. The only thing that came with it was a sheet saying I could send it back to "properly" dispose of the battery. I am just keeping it and now I have a backup battery. Michael Scott would say this is a win-win-win situation.
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