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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

Well, one more thing to worry about. Should I leave my MacBooks in the bathroom sink when going out?

If you're going to be worried about everything that has a small chance of failing and injuring you, I'm sorry to say you're currently living in a minefield. But statistically you'd be more likely to break your toe on the coffee table than your laptop exploding and burning down your house.

Breaking your toe on the coffee table, I'd say has a pretty high statistical chance.

My toe will heal, the stakes are low. My house burning down on the other hand can have fatal consequences for my cat if I'm not at home.

Depending on where you live, house destroying disasters like earthquakes, floods, and storms have similarly fatal consequences but are statistically more likely to occur. My point is make reasonable preparations and insure any valuable belongings, but thinking about it too much doesn't make it any less likely its going to happen to you.

I broke my toe on the coffee table last year and in my old mbp battery swallowed - so it's not very comforting

I'm guessing your home is far more likely to burn down from other causes than from your Macbook. A Galaxy Note 7, on the other hand...

There isn't enough information in the article to determine the cause of the fire. He does say he was sitting in bed browsing the Internet, so it's possible he had the laptop resting on some blankets, which blocked the vents and caused the laptop to overheat and shut down.

I haven't heard of MacBooks spontaneously exploding under normal conditions.

There're many temperature sensors inside a laptop. They are designed to shut down on high-temperature conditions, well before exploding. The blankets cannot be the cause of the problem, without positing a second failure of some sort to defeat the safeties?

> it's possible he had the laptop resting on some blankets

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.

In my experience, resting a Macbook on something that's soft (like a blanket) so that the underside is blocked has rather catastrophic effects on its ventilation.

That said, it should not be possible to cause a runaway failure in the battery via the laptop overheating.

In the tub! The flames from burning lithium can reach several feet high.

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