“Do Apple’s Macintosh computers emit toxic fumes? That’s the allegation made by a French newspaper,” Ben Worthen blogs for The Wall Street Journal.
“Liberation.fr ran an article recently citing an unnamed researcher who, after noticing a strange smell coming from his Mac Pro, tested the computer and found that it contained a chemical called benzene, which can cause skin and eye irritation. Exposure to large amounts of benzene can cause leukemia,” Worthen reports. “Here’s the original article, for anyone who speaks French.)”
Worthen reports, “Apple, for its part, doesn’t know anything about benzene. ‘We have not found anything that supports this claim but continue to investigate it for customers,’ an Apple spokesman tells us.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We haven’t experienced any odors with a Mac Pro, beyond the normal “new computer smell” that only lasts for a week or two. but we have come across at least one old iBook that smelled distinctly like body odor (but, it wasn’t body odor, unless that iBook was working out on the treadmill and then not showering when we weren’t looking). Please note that we’ve had several iBooks, MacBooks and MacBook Pros treated exactly the same, used on the same desks, and carried in the same backpacks/cases by exactly the same people and they emitted no odors whatsoever.
We chalked it up to “ain’t that the damnedest thing” or, possibly, “who dumped the milk into the iBook and didn’t say anything?” But, maybe, just maybe, we weren’t crazy and something really was up with that iBook? Has anyone else experienced what we have with an iBook*, or with a Mac Pro, or any other Mac?
*After a bit of googling, we found that Low End Mac certainly has encountered iBook smell: “Apparently an adhesive used in the labeling and construction of the keyboard would begin to out-gas about 12-18 months after the iBook was manufactured. This gas smells remarkably like ripe, testosterone-enriched perspiration, and it only gets worse with age.“
My Mac smells like cheese… yummmm
<Braaaaaaaaaap> Oops, sorry. No, it was me not the Mac.
Give me a freakin’ break. Windows is the one that is emitting a terrible stench.
Hmm, Windows smells like shit to me.
Let’s see, recommendations to drastically drop the target price of Apple stock, claiming that macs emit Toxic fumes…
Maybe this is how M$ is spending it’s $300M advertising budget…
There is an odour that came from both my Powermac G5 and MacBook when they were both new. I find this smell similar to the new car smell; it eventually goes away and nothing else can be detected.
The guy that ran this “analysis” used GC-MS, a technique so sensitive it will pick up parts per billion of just about anything. And his “analysis” was not quantitative – he did not issue any hard numbers. And he ran no controls. In other words, this is a farce, both scientifically and legally.
For benzene to cause cancer (or other health effects), one has to have an occupational exposure of several ppm for months or years. There is no way a computer could outgas that kind of level of “fumes”. You get greater exposure to benzene pumping your own gas than you ever could from a piece of computer hardware, yeeesh.
No, but I smell a big fat lawsuit coming.
Cupertino, fire up the leeches!!!
Yes – I work at a school where I have about 50 ibooks and many have that nasty odor. At least for the ones that haven’t crapped out because of the bad logic boards.
I tell my teachers to take a snuggle laundry sheet and place it under the keyboard – no fires yet. That seems to help.
Strange smell? Benzene has a sweet odor. None of my Macs have ever smelled sweet. Some have smelled bad but it was temporary and I suspect it wasn’t the Mac (but someone else in the room blaming it on the Mac as there were no dogs laying around)
At least it’s not emitting toxic Zunes.
Mac Pros do emit an odour for the first few days/weeks of use and almost everybody who cares to sniff, will notice it (shame on MDN for fibbing about that).
This is the “new computer smell” that some people prize so much, and is similar to the “new car smell” which has acquired legendary status.
The smell comes from the plastics out-gassing as they harden, and the flame retardant chemicals used on the motherboard. It goes away within a short while, but they *are* toxic gasses for the most part.
I don’t know off-hand if Benzene is one of them, but that smell is definitely not good for you and does contain some cancer-causing agents.
That being said, there is a lot worse out there to worry about than this. You are way, way more likely to get cancer from heating your lunch in a plastic container or drinking bottled water from a plastic bottle than you are from the brief exposure you get to toxic chemicals as your computer heats up. The plastic molecules you are eating with the Ravioli will definitely kill you over time.
The same bad chemicals in your computer are also present in much vaster quantities in the average piece of rug or carpet, or the average piece of furniture bought from the local budget furniture place.
Yes. The fumes of elitism.
Somebody tell Steve Ballmer to quit farting on his iBook. Its gross and smells bad, too. LOL
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“The plastic molecules you are eating with the Ravioli will definitely kill you over time.”
Good to know.
Also, just being born is fatal eventually. It’s true. No, really.
“The fumes of elitism.”
Also known as Bill O’Reilly.
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
We French have benzene everywhere, even our Perrier.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C0CE7D61F39F933A25751C0A966958260
Ampar, er, Nick Fury:
This doesn’t sound at all like elitism to me:
“Most Americans play by the rules. We work hard, pay our taxes, and try to be good citizens. When the government urges us to invest for retirement, many of us do, putting hard-earned dollars into a financial system we are told is honest. But it wasn’t honest, was it? As Talking Points has demonstrated over the past week, both parties have betrayed the folks. Christopher Cox, the head of the SEC, now admits that his watchdog agency failed to watch the bad guys. At least Cox is man enough to admit what happened. Not so for Congressman Barney Frank, who has been directly involved with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for years. In 2003 Frank said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ‘are not facing any kind of financial crisis.’ Now Frank is railing against those who dare criticize him. He denounced me for ‘asserting that I had spent all this time … demanding more purchase of low-income mortgages.’ According to many of his peers in the House, that’s exactly what Barney Frank did. The record is clear – Fannie and Freddie collapsed on his watch and he should resign. The feds now must fix what they allowed to happen, and people like Barney Frank and Christopher Cox need to be replaced. No question!”
– Bill O’Reilly, 9/30/2008
What the heck is an Amercian?
(And lighten up, Francis.)
Life leads to death.
Many of the French people are known to emit their own “toxic odors.”
A failing electrolytic capacitor makes a terrible smell, MDN that may be the nasty odor.
On the iBook that is.
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Don’t worry, it’s just a pre-test of Steve’s toxic fume emitting technology which, at the right time, will be used to kill off the fanboy community and move them on to the level above human.