Toxic Fumes From Mac Pros?

Fanboi Killa writes "Apple is investigating damning claims, published in a leading French newspaper, that its computers emit a toxic odor containing chemicals including the cancer-causing benzene. Apple has not denied the accusations. Its spokesman, Bill Evans, told Macworld the company had not found any evidence to support the claim but Apple would continue to investigate. Posts on Apple's own discussion boards suggest the Mac maker knew about potentially toxic odors being linked to its computers as early as December last year."

Lies

[sogoodsofarsowhat]

It is greenpeace....why is this news. They are just a bunch of hippie-tree huggers pushing their agenda much like PETA. I would not believe anything these people say...even if they said the sky was blue i would get 2 independent studies done and still would not trust what GP was saying. /stupid lying hippies

Re:Not MacBooks

[TheRaven64]

and the Ext2 drivers from SourceForge also made it unstable

There are lots of reasons why OS X can be unstable (ATi drivers, in particular), but third-party kernel modules are pretty much top of the list. Mine stopped crashing after uninstalling the Parallels kernel modules - perhaps you should try checking kextstat and unloading anything that isn't com.apple.*.

Only thing left on it that I can pinpoint for problems besides the Bluetooth is VMWare Fusion - whenever one of the VMs locks up (75% of uses), I have to hit the power button to make the machine restart.

Yup, sounds like a badly-written third-party kernel module. Pretty much any OS will be unstable if you run dodgy third-party code in kernelspace. The Parallels devs didn't bother reading the Intel docs for the Core 2 Duo and were doing badly wrong things with inter-processor interrupts. I wouldn't be surprised if the VMWare guys were equally incompetent.

Re:Don't worry

[Anonymous Coward]

It is ironic, one of the comments to the original article is by somebody who works in that lab and points out that lab works with the same chemicals supposedly emitting fumes.

Sounds like somebody spilled something.

Yes on MacBook Pros

[bill_mcgonigle]

He didn't mean the MacBookPro (MBP), he meant Mac Pro, you know, the big desktop systems, one of these [apple.com].

The MacBook Pro's had an awful toxic stink problem as of November 2006. I got one and for a month breathed nasty plastic-burn smell that really got in my mucus membranes in my nose - the only other time being when I've ridden on coal-fired locomotives.

I finally figured out that running SETI@Home for a week got the machine so hot that all of the badness burned off. So, I assume it was something to do with the CPU, thermal paste, or similar component (memory controller?) - I had the visuals all off.

I know I wrote about it somewhere...hrm, not on my blog.