Dell recalls 4M laptop computer batteries

This arti­cle first appeared on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=46

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060814/ap_on_hi_te/dell_battery_recall

“The [Con­sumer Prod­uct Safety Com­mis­sion]. knows of 339 inci­dents in which lithium bat­ter­ies used in lap­tops and cell phones — not just Dell prod­ucts — over­heated between 2003 and 2005, Wolf­son said.“

When we’re talk­ing about over­heat­ing, we’re talk­ing about explo­sions and fires.

Last week, British offi­cials banned lap­top com­put­ers and audio play­ers as carry-on items, fol­low­ing the gel bomb arrests.

A UPS cargo plane was destroyed by fire last Feb­ru­ary in Philadel­phia. The blaze may have been started by a crate full of lap­top com­puter batteries.

This Dell recall may inspire air­lines or the FAA to draft tighter restric­tions on lap­top com­put­ers, iPods and cell phones in com­mer­cial air­planes. Lithium-ion bat­ter­ies are com­monly used in both devices, as they per­form well and last longer than other recharge­able batteries.

Pas­sen­gers may not be happy. I always carry my elec­tronic devices in my carry-on bag when I fly, sim­ply because I don’t want them jos­tled and fon­dled in my checked baggage.

See the chap­ter on com­puter hard­ware in the IS 6100 textbook.

Lap­top com­put­ers require a large amount of elec­tri­cal energy. While it is pos­si­ble to power a VoIP (Voice over Inter­net Pro­to­col) phone from an RJ-45 net­work jack, this only needs about 5 watts of elec­tri­cal power.

You may be famil­iar with the watt, as it’s the stan­dard mea­sure for house­hold light bulbs.

Five watts not nearly enough to power a lap­top com­puter. Even the small­est lap­tops use much more pow­er­ful batteries.

In com­par­i­son, a AAA bat­tery deliv­ers only a few watts, and for a lim­ited amount of time.

August 15: Here’s some addi­tional infor­ma­tion from Engad­get, which has been cov­er­ing this story for sev­eral months. Check the mul­ti­ple links regard­ing explo­sions in this arti­cle. A reader posted a link to Dell’s state­ment here, includ­ing instruci­tons on replace­ment batteries.

The New York Times reports that Sony man­age­ment con­firmed that the com­pany man­u­fac­tured and sold the affected bat­ter­ies to Dell. The bat­ter­ies were shipped to Dell cus­tomers in com­put­ers sold between April 2004 and July 18.

CNN reported on August 15 that Sony is pay­ing most or all of the recall costs. While this min­i­mizes Dell’s direct losses, they will see an imme­di­ate drop in sales rev­enue as cus­tomers choose Dell’s competitors.

The Hous­ton Chron­i­cle reports that cus­tomers are ham­mer­ing Dell with e-mails and phone calls as news spreads about the recall.

Engad­get reported on August 6 that an Apple Power­Book exploded. Apple has already mounted a recall for some Power­Book and Mac­Book mod­els, and Sony bat­ter­ies are involved.

Tagged as: airlines, Apple, customer, dc, Dell, france, hardware, Internet, iPod, mac, management, media, mobile, power, reliability, revenue, Sony, USA, VoIP, Yahoo