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It's also a story the general gist of which isn't exactly new. Way back in 1999, Salon.com's Janelle Brown posted a column entitled "Eau de Mac," suggesting that: "perhaps today's olfactory status symbol is the smell of scorching plastic." Ms. Brown's reference was to a review on Macintouch of the then-new PowerMac G4 machines which noted that the computers emitted an unpleasant odor when turned on, and an Apple Tech Info Library article that acknowledged: "New Equipment: Odors May Be Present Short-Term." Or sometimes not-so-short term.
Apple's 1999 tech bulletin said that "In some cases, an unusual odor may be detected when a product has been turned on and allowed to warm up to operating temperature. Typically, the odor is detected when the product is new, similar to odors generated from new carpeting or a new car. In most cases the odor will dissipate over a short period of time." Or not, as we shall discuss further below.
Apple suggested that if the odor problem persists, that the machine be placed in a well-ventilated room and allowed to operate over an "extended" period of time (possibly 24-72 hours) or until the odor dissipates.
But while it is true in my experience that computers do tend to "gas off" over time, it takes a long time usually measured in years rather than days, weeks, or even a few months. It's not only Apple computers that are affected either, and and not much has come of a decade of complaining about it, but last week a report in the French newspaper Libération moved the issue onto the front burner again. ( For an English machine translation of the article, click here. )
Seems, according to the Libération report, a molecular biologist at France's CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Science and Research) - who has remained anonymous by request, was affected by a strange smell coming from his new Mac Pro back in February 2007. Symptoms cited included his eye, nose, and larynx irritation and soreness. After he receiving no satisfactory resolution of the issue from Apple, which reportedly sent out second computer for him to try, which he found just as objectionably smelly, he contacted Greenpeace to get the chemical vapors emerging from his Mac analyzed by Analytica, an independent laboratory, which found seven volatile organic contaminants. According to the Libération article and other subsequent reports, some of the emissions were identified by gas chromatography and mass spectrometry as toxic, harmful substances, including propanal, benzene, ethanone, isobenzofurandione, propanone and acetic acid, as well as styrene and benzene, the latter of particular concern because it is a potent carcinogen suspected of contributing to bone marrow damage and leukemia for people exposed over long periods of time, while short-term exposure may result in nausea, vomiting, dizziness, narcosis, reduction in blood pressure, and Central Nervous System (CNS) depression. "Benzene can affect the bone marrow. Imagine a person works eight hours a day for two months inhaling such vapors, sensitive people could very well develop leukemia, " said Annie Leszkowicz, an expert in chemical risk for the French Agency for safety of the environment and labor quoted in the Libération piece. The American Cancer Society says benzene has been found to elevate cancer probability in workers exposed to a minuscule 10 parts per million. Skin contact may lead to dermatitis. Long-term exposure may lead to irreversible effects, and it's a severe eye irritant.
However, Macworld's Philip Michaels reported Wednesday that Apple says it has not seen any evidence to back Libération’s claim that Mac Pros are emitting toxic odors, including benzene.
“We have not found anything that supports this claim, but continue to investigate it for the customer,” Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Macworld.
It is also important to note that the Analytica lab analysis was was qualitative - identifying the substances present, but not quantitative - determining levels of chemical emissions, so no conclusions as to the degree, if any, of real-world health risk can be drawn without further research.
On Thursday HardMac's Lionel reported that some sources speculate the Mac Pro issue "might involve a secondary elements, and not necessarily a component, and currently it seems that the thermal paste might be the source of such issue. Indeed, some users reported to have solved the problem by either making the computer running full CPU load for couple of days, or by changing the thermal paste."
On the other hand, the issue is not nothing. HardMac's Lionel observes that about a year ago their French language website (macbidouille.com) reported some Mac Pro owners complaining about a weird and irritating smell emanating from their Mac Pros when switched on. There have been other sporadic anecdotal reports of smelly Mac Pros in various forums over the past couple of years. Here are a few snippets:
AppleDefects.com cites a MacForum thread:
"My Mac Pro is about a month old and my power supply unit has been changed twice because it smells like bad perfume when it’s running. It really stinks.... When this was discussed on Apple’s forum the thread was locked and some of the messages were erased because there was talk of possible harmful fumes....."
and
"yes my Mac Pro really stinks too. I directed an external fan on my mac so the smell go in another direction, but it’s really annoying. I thought it’s gonna go away but after more then 2 month it’s still smell bad that I can’t stand it without using a fan."
A MacRumors forum comment:
"What is this smell coming from the Mac Pro? It's not bad, or unpleasant, but ever since I took it out of the box, it's had this aroma, sort of like a new car smell?"
From a discussions.apple.com thread:
"Does anyone notice a musty smell with the new Mac Pros? I recently purchased the new 8-core and it emits a very musty odor when powered up. My entire room soon smells bad and I have had to resort to a few air fresheners just to be able to work on it. I thought it might have something to do with it coming from China but we also purchased a 2.66 GHZ Mac Pro, that was assembled in CA, at work and it smells the same. [Editor's note - even assembled in California, most of the internal components probably were sourced in the Far East]"
and
"The guy in the service center said that every Mac Pro he has set up has the smell at first, so it appears to be normal in his experience. He thinks it is caused by a protective resin coating on the RAM PCB's and/or RAM riser card PCB's and should diminish over time as it burns away."
but
"...I bought a new Mac Pro Quad 3,0 a few weeks ago. After some hours it started to smell very badly. You couldn't stay in the same room. Smelled like a sort of ammonia. I thought that it might help to run the machine under heavy load, to "burn out the problem." So I ran the machine 24 hours for 4 days in a separate room. It didn't change anything. So I called the company I bought it from. They replaced the PSU. Now after one week I ran into the same problem."
Despite all the hoopla and hype about "green computing" lately, my suspicion is that there's about zero attention being paid to the (officially) sub-toxic user-environment chemical emission issue by the computer industry in general (not only Apple), but with a large and growing proportion of the population - including many children - using computers every day, rates of asthma skyrocketing, and more and more people being diagnosed with chemical sensitivity, the issue is getting harder to ignore. What is the air quality like in a classroom full of new computers? How much do computer fumes contribute to the "sick building syndrome" phenomenon in some office buildings?
The problem has gotten progressively worse over the past decade, with the introduction of hotter (literally as well as figuratively) processing chips, more RAM, faster hard disks, and almost certainly different types of plastic and phenolic circuit board material being used in newer computers, especially since the preponderance of computer manufacturing has shifted to Taiwan, China, and other Far East venues where environmental standards tend to be lax and both consciousness of and concern over environmental air quality matters are relatively low.
I can attest to personally observing back in 1998 that WallStreet PowerBooks built a few months apart in Cork, Ireland and in Taiwan respectively in side-by-side comparison smelled a lot different, not to the Taiwan machines' advantage, or mine. The Irish PowerBook caused me no problems; the Taiwanese ones made mw feel quite ill. I was a sales agent for a Mac reseller at the time so had the opportunity to observe the transition, from which Apple laptops have never recovered, as it unfolded. I don't think it's coincidental that Janelle Brown's Salon piece that I referred to above appeared in 1999 after much of Apple's hardware outsourcing shifted to the Far East.
Recent problems with China-sourced products such as toys painted with lead-based coatings, milk and milk-containing products deliberately adulterated with toxic melamine, and contaminated pet food have revealed what seems to be a systemic lack of concern and regulatory oversight in the product safety context in Chinese industry.
The organic solvents most commonly identified as emitting in off-gassing from personal computers have been aromatic hydrocarbons, phenols, trichloroethylene, xylene, vinyl chloride, acetone and related compounds. Environmental medicine specialist Dr. Sherry Rogers, M.D. of Syracuse, New York, notes: "We don't really know the long-term and cumulative effects of these chemicals in the bloodstream and how they are affecting the gene pool of future generations." As more and more people become chemically sensitive - and this appears to be happening - computer chemical emissions are an issue that needs to be pro-actively addressed.
It's one that cuts particularly close to home for me. I’ve been battling Multiple Chemical Sensitivity since the early ‘70s and have been significantly handicapped by it since 1989, at which point it reached a level of severity that began to impose major restrictions on my lifestyle. I’ve written about MCS in the computer usage context from time to time over the past decade, and my musings on the topic usually generate three types of response from readers: polite (or sometimes not-so-polite) skepticism, acknowledgment of consciousness having been raised, and requests from fellow MCS sufferers for more information on coping strategies.
An estimated 13 million-plus people have been diagnosed by physicians as being especially sensitive to very low environmental concentrations of common substances. Many react so strongly that they become significantly debilitated or disabled. But while people with MCS react to levels of environmental chemicals hundreds or perhaps even thousands of times lower than conventionally accepted levels of toxicity, some researchers believe presumed "sub-toxic" exposures to increasing levels of environmental chemicals in homes and workplaces are a health hazard to the general, non-sensitized (yet) public. Pulmonary disorders increased by 54 per cent in women and 41 percent in men between l981 and 1991. Asthma has become more prevalent, less treatable, and more often fatal over the past 15 years.
Of course, most people at least seem to tolerate exposures to low or even moderate levels of chemicals with no apparent problems. After all, people work in computer factories, and for that matter chemical factories, where concentrations of these substances are presumably much higher than any computer end-user experiences. On the other hand, a study conducted from 1987 to 1996 at Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, ( JAMA. 1999;281:1106-1109) found that women occupationally exposed to organic solvents during pregnancy were 13 times more likely to bear children with major birth defects. Birth weights were also lower for those with longer exposure to solvents, and the study also found a trend toward more miscarriages. Among the study's participants were factory workers, laboratory technicians, professional artists and graphic designers, chemists and cleaners.
Would it be possible to build non-smelly computers - or at least less smelly computers , while maintaining current and future levels of performance progress, if odor-reduction became a design and manufacturing priority objective? I'm not a chemical or electronics engineer, but I think so. The brand-new PowerBook 5300 I bought in October, 1996, which was built in Mountain View, California, had no noticeable odor right out of the box. The Irish-built G3 Series PowerBooks did emit some chemical odor, but it was relatively mild. Since PowerBook G3 production was shifted to Taiwan in 1998, however, Apple notebooks have gotten seemingly less and less tolerable to chemically sensitive folks, and although part of this is almost certainly attributable to higher running temperatures causing more prolific off-gassing, these computers simply reek of chemical odor even when shut off and cold - even the metal-skinned 'Books, indicating that the chemical composition of internal components is the likely culprit. This is an issue we are going to hear a lot more about - especially if far-Eastern computer makers keep building smellier and smellier computers. I could say I'm not holding my breath waiting for improvement, but unfortunately I'm obliged to.
Charles W. Moore
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