“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.“