Japanese authorities have reported the first case of an Apple laptop catching fire in Japan and ordered the US company to investigate the trouble involving the faulty Sony batteries and report back within a week.
A laptop made by Apple Computer overheated and caught fire in April, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said. The user sustained minor burns after the iBook G4 computer caught fire, according to Apple spokeswoman Michiko Matsumoto.
Last week, Apple told customers to return 1.8 million lithium-ion batteries used in Mac laptops because they could cause the computers to overheat and ignite. Last week, Dell announced a recall of 4.1 million batteries, the largest recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry. Dell's batteries used cells manufactured by Sony that could potentially short-circuit and cause a fire, even if the laptop is switched off.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a press release on Thursday: "These lithium ion batteries can overheat, posing a fire hazard to consumers."
Apple's 1.8 million recalled batteries represent about 32 per cent of the nearly 5.6 million laptops the company shipped during the quarterly periods covered by the recall, according to IDC. Dell's recall, though larger in number, represents a smaller portion of its sales, given that it sold 22 million laptops during the period covered by its recall, again according to IDC. (The number of batteries recalled does not necessarily mean that 1.8 million laptops were affected, as some users purchase more than one battery for their systems.)
An Apple spokesman said the company does not expect the recall to have a material financial impact on the company, "We discovered that some Sony batteries in previous models of Power PC-based PowerBooks and iBooks do not meet Apple's standards for safety and performance. None of Apple's Intel-based laptops are affected."
Sony will take a financial hit from the combined impact of the Apple and Dell recalls. As with Dell, Sony plans to offer financial support to Apple's recall effort, said the spokesman. The total cost of the Apple and Dell recalls could fall between USD 172 million and USD 258 million, Sony said in a statement.
Last week, ministry officials reported that batteries in Dell laptops imported to Japan caught fire in at least two separate instances in October and June. No one was injured in those incidents, but the fires destroyed the machines.
Battery packs contain cells of rolled up metal strips. Sony has said that during production, crimping the rolls left tiny shards of metal loose in the cells, and some of those shards can cause batteries to short-circuit, or in extreme cases, catch fire.
Apple's Matsumoto declined to say the number of batteries the recall involves in Japan and how many have been recalled. A call to an Apple corporate spokesman in Cupertino was not immediately returned early Tuesday.
The trade ministry has also instructed other Japanese electronic makers to check the safety of their laptop batteries. Dell has already recalled batteries from affected models in Japan. Batteries powering Sony's Vaio laptops don't have the same problems, according to the Tokyo-based manufacturer.
This does not bode well for Sony, which is betting heavily on the successful launches of two core pieces to its medium term strategy – that of its PS3 multimedia unit and Blu-Ray standard. Apple and Dell are two principal backers of Blu-Ray.
