Sorry, Steve, But The G4 Stinks, And So Does My PowerBook

Salon.com's Janelle Brown posted a short column this week entitled "Eau de Mac," in which she suggests that "perhaps today's olfactory status symbol is the smell of scorching plastic."

Ms. Brown's reference was to Macintouch's recent review of the new PowerMac G4 machines which noted that the computers emitted an unpleasant odor when turned on, and an Apple Tech Info Library article that acknowledges: "New Equipment: Odors May Be Present Short-Term."

Apple says 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 suggests 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.

A disclaimer also notes that "This article is not tied to any specific product, nor is it in reaction to any specific issue. This article is meant only to serve as general information."

I'm grateful to Ms. Brown for highlighting this issue, which cuts all too close to home for me. So sit back, and I'll regale youl you with some tales from the front.

For the past quarter-century, I have been fighting a gradually losing battle with environmental illness, including what is sometimes referred to as Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) or Chemical Allergy. While MCS is highly controversial, and is not accepted as a "legitimate diagnosis" by a substantial portion of the medical community, I can assure you that it is very real when you live with it 24 hours a day. I have been diagnosed by several MDs specializing in the field, including Dr. Gerald Ross, formerly of the Environmental Health Center in Dallas, Texas. Dr. Ross is a fellow Nova Scotian, and set up Nova Scotia's government funded Environmental Health Centre, where I have been a patient off and on since 1991.

I won't bore you with extensive details, but suffice to say that being acutely sensitive to a wide variety of common, everyday, chemical substances even at extremely minuscule environmental levels, complicates one's life profoundly. Which is why the PowerBook G3 Series II that I'm typing this story on is currently "under glass." More on that in a moment.

The issue that Macintouch and the Apple TIL article addressed is a serious and ongoing problem for chemically-sensitive people who use computers. Indeed, "new stuff," from clothing to carpets to coatings to household appliances, all of which tend to gas off chemical vapors for months or even years, is almost always troublesome. Most new stuff -- not just computers -- is capable of making me quite ill. This is not a problem only with Apple machines. PCs stink (literally as well as figuratively in their case) too.

However, in my experience, while not all computers stink equally, the problem seems to be getting a lot worse lately, probably a consequence of hotter (literally as well as figuratively) processing chips, and perhaps different types of plastic and phenolic circuit board material being used in newer computers.

As more and more people become chemically sensitive -- and this appears to be happening -- computer odors are an issue that, at least in my less-than-objective opinion, needs to be pro-actively addressed.

One of the difficulties in addressing it is the fact that the problem is highly idiosyncratic, both in terms of the offending chemicals and the individual reactions of those affected. For example, among the several telephones we have in the house are two made by the same manufacturer, purchased about a year apart, and similar in external appearance. They are now about seven or eight years old, so one would assume that they are as "gassed off" as they are going to get. From the time it was new, the older unit never had any smell that I could detect. The other one still smells strongly of circuit board phenolic to a degree that I am unable to use it, especially if the weather is humid. Presumably, the chemical formulae of the phenolic resins used in these unit's respective circuit boards differs chemically in some substantial way.

My first Mac was a Plus, purchased used, and the only odor problem I had with it was the scent of patchouli oil used by the previous owner, which had permeated the machine's plastics -- especially the keyboard and mouse. This took about six months to dissipate, but finally did go away.

When I bought my first new Mac, a 1993 LC 520, it did have the "new stuff" smell problem. I essentially did with it what Apple suggests in the TIL article -- ran it for several days continuously in a closed room, with the added wrinkle of an ozone generator running full blast to help things along.

After that treatment, the pong of new plastics, etc., had dissipated enough that I could use the computer so long as I placed it with the cooling fan outlet pointed into an open stairwell and away from me. For over a year afterward, I could still smell the circuit boards if I walked downstairs when the computer was running, but it was a "localized" odor that circulated away from my workstation. For the past several years, the old LC, unlike the smelly telephone, appears to have gassed off completely. Of course it's now obsolete too.

I lucked out with my PowerBook 5300, which I bought new in 1996. The 5300 was olfactorily benign from day one and has remained so. The absence of a cooling fan probably helped, as no doubt does the relatively cool-running 603e chip. The 5300's case also is evidently molded from a non-aromatic plastic.

However, I always have to be cautious, so when I decided to replace the trusty 5300 with a WallStreet G3 Series machine last winter, I arranged to try a demo machine for several weeks before taking the plunge.

The demo was a cacheless 233 MHz Series I unit, and it did have a distinct, plasticky, circuit board odor about it, but odor, per se, is not necessarily a problem. I tolerate some odors quite well, while reacting severely to other substances that have no smell at all (eg: chlorofluorocarbon solvents). Anyway, the G3 Series 1 seemed tolerable, and after a few weeks of using it I ordered a new G3 Series II 233 MHz machine.

When my new PowerBook arrived, I noticed that it also had a distinct, and stronger plastic/phenolic odor, but a different "flavor," if you will -- sort of "sweeter." The Series I demo unit was made in Ireland, while my Series II came from Taiwan, so I reasoned that perhaps the plastics were of a slightly different chemical composition.

Unfortunately, as soon as I started using my new WallStreet, I noticed I would begin to feel significant pain in the usual places after working for 1/2 hour or so, especially if I used the CD-ROM drive which blows a lot of circuit-board odor out the cooling vents.

OK, I thought, it just needs to be run for a while to "cook" the smells out of the plastics and circuit boards. To that end, I set it up to run off a RAM disk 24 hours a day with 19 copies of the QuickTime sample movie looping continuously. This went on for about three weeks with no noticeable improvement in the odor problem. I continued to use the Series I demo with no difficulties.

My son, Tristan then came up with the idea of installing a suction fan in the basement and running a duct to it, feeding from the PowerBook's PC card bay through a nozzle he fabricated from pine. That should take care of any circuit board odors escaping from the vents or the keyboard, we reasoned, and in fact we found that the 'Book ran so cool with the fan force-ventilating it that we could tape over the standard cooling vents entirely.

No joy, though. Even with the fan running I still would become ill after about half an hour of sitting at the machine. Presumably the circuit board odors were not the whole story. Presumably the case plastics were also causing me grief. Meanwhile, I had to give the Series I demo back, and was obliged to revert to the 5300, while my daughter delightedly got to use the WallStreet.

That was in early March. For six months I waited hopefully for the G3 to age and lose its odor, but it wasn't a very lively hope. I would from time to time try it again, but would react almost immediately. Tristan's identical WallStreet, built in the same Taiwanese factory a week earlier than mine, but purchased three months earlier, was getting a lot heavier use and it still smelled. And a third identical machine owned by my nephew, David, also being used intensively, smelled even worse than the other two. My brother-in-law, who is not environmentally ill, tells me that particular WallStreet would make his eyes water if he came into the room where it was when it was new. As he put it:

"It does not surprise me though that the G3 would be a problem; when David's was brand new especially, his room was in a cloud. I thought he should at least park the thing downstairs at night to have a few clear hours. He did not listen of course. The frog in the pot syndrome. He suffers no obvious immediate ill effects from the thing; not to say there might not be delayed responses of one sort or another."

When I first wrote about my odor problem with the WallStreet last March, reader Steve Marsh wrote with the following comments:

I've noticed the smell phenomenon myself with my G3 PowerBook (I'm using it now, and it's been working for a few hours, with a CD playing, and it's hot).

The odor is very distinct. The machine itself is now 4 months old, and, as you've noticed yourself, the odor is in fact getting worse rather than better. I don't know if it'll improve or not in more time. Fortunately I'm not affected by this.

Another reader, Noel J. Ulloa, noted:

I do not suffer from MCS, but a curious incident did occur to me the first week I had my G3 series (233/12.1 TFT) PowerBook. As I used it those first few days, I noticed a bit of an odor coming from the PowerBook but did not give it much thought. As I spent more time exploring it, (my first laptop) I noticed that the heat it gives off combined with the strange smell made me very queasy. One night it was so bad that I could not work any longer and I set it aside for a couple of days. As I began using it again, I made sure that I was in a well ventilated room. The effects that gave me the nausea slowly ebbed away and I either no longer notice it, or it just took some time for the machine to (for lack of a better term) break-in.

Interestingly, Noel's PowerBook was manufactured the same week as mine, almost exactly one year ago in the week of September 14, 1998.

One of my Mac dealer friends suggested:

It could be the vinyl in the gray plastic on the exterior of the case. That's the only thing that I could possibly guess that would be different about the manufacturing/plastics in the new G3s that I can think of. A whole lot of any Polyvinyl Chlorides don't polymerize, and so off-gas for at least a year.

Reader and PowerBook owner Prof. Jeffrey Harris of the Plasma Research Laboratory at Australian National University in Canberra had a really radical suggestion.

Regarding your G3 plastic troubles, first, my sympathies. I had a college suite mate who had similar troubles with lots of new clothes -- probably the surfactants and detergents used in manufacture, he thought. Perhaps if you let the G3 age for a year or more, the outgassing will die off and your allergies will not be excited.

An even more radical solution might be to wash the machine. This works wonders for sticky mice and keyboards---I put mine in the dishwasher with good results. Just like is done in the factory. The parts of a PowerBook were certainly washed at some point, but doing it to the assembled machine requires nerve. It is probably the drying that is critical.

Well, it would take a braver man than I to plunk a brand new PowerBook in a dishwasher, but who knows?

As you can imagine, this whole affair has been a major disappointment for me. I love the WallStreet, but after six months I was getting pessimistic as to whether I would ever be able to use it. Buying the G3 had already strained my budget, so my options were to take a major financial hit by selling it (but what would I replace it with?), continuing to use the 5300 as my main workhorse, or come up with another plan.

While brainstorming about all this one day I recalled that environmental illness activist and author Bruce Small had written several years ago about having problems with computer odors, and how he worked around it by putting the CPU and monitor on the far side of a glass partition. My doctor suggested that the sort of plexiglass air extraction hood used in laboratories where dangerous microorganisms are handled might be a solution. The latter seemed beyond my resources, but the glass barrier idea had possibilities.

What I came up with was an open-bottomed glass case, framed in well-aged spruce (wood odors are also a problem for me) shaped like a giant, open PowerBook. The case has hinged lids over the keyboard and at the top of the upright section for quick access when necessary, and is wide enough that the CD-ROM tray and the PC Card slots can both be used without interference, and accessed by lifting the lid over the keyboard. This contraption fits over the open PowerBook, and the suction ventilator duct referred to above slots into an aperture in the side to force- ventilate the box and suck plastic fumes into the basement.

It's not elegant, but I can finally use my WallStreet -- albeit with an external keyboard and mouse. And that's another story. Bad enough that computers reek of chemicals, but I've discovered to my dismay that most keyboards do too. One of the things I like most about the WallStreet is its lovely, short-travel, light-touch keyboard. I have peripheral neuropathy, presumed to be a related consequence of my general immune-system problems, and typing is often quite painful.

The search for a usable keyboard involved another bizarre Odyssey. Jason Pierce, my publisher at the MacTimes Website, kindly arranged for me to get a Kinesis Contour ergonomic keyboard. The Kinesis is a lovely unit, and very easy on the hands and arms, but unfortunately I didn't even get it properly unpacked before I was having a full-blown reaction. The circuit boards in the Kinesis -- especially the flexible ones under the curved, convex keywells -- are VERY strong-smelling. I was able to test the keyboard out for a review by wearing a gas mask, but that is not a satisfactory solution for everyday use.

The next ergonomic keyboard I checked out was a DataDesk SmartBoard. Its keys also have a very nice action, and I found it comfortable to type on, but sadly it also smells -- a different odor than the Kinesis ( this time a hint of epoxy?), but still intolerable for me.

Next up: an Adesso ergonomic keyboard. Again, nice to type on, but it stinks. So does the MacAirKey wireless keyboard I reviewed here on Applelinks a few weeks ago, although that one seems to be improving, and I think may possibly be usable in a few months.

Finally, I bought a MacAlly New Wave extended keyboard, an inexpensive membrane unit. The "ergonomic" part is basically a palm-rest grafted on to the basic MacAlly keyboard, but mirabile dictu, it does not smell. Not even new right out of the box. There is hope! Perhaps part of the reason for the MacAlly's olfactory non-obtrusiveness is that the keyswitch membrane is, well, a membrane -- a big, one-piece silicon mat that prevents circuit board odors from wafting up through the keys. However, when we took it apart to check things out, the circuit boards did not have a very strong smell either, and both the Adesso and MacAirKey 'boards are membrane types too and they DO smell.

One thing the MacAlly keyboard proves is that it is possible to manufacture computer equipment, in beige plastic at least, that can be tolerated by the chemically sensitive, although I expect that in this case it is pure happenstance.

The MacAlly is not as comfortable to type on as the other 'boards mentioned above, but it's a lot better than the several, older, Apple keyboards I have kicking around, and it happily makes it possible for me to use the "WallStreet under glass." I hope that someday the WallStreet will gas off to an extent that I'll be able to use it as it was intended to be used, but for now I'm in business, and enjoying the speed of the G3 after the relative pokiness of the faithful old 5300.

Getting back to the general issue of smelly computers, G4 machines, or even Apple computers, are certainly not the only ones afflicted. I had high hopes that the iMac, with its polycarbonate case, would prove tolerable, but the first iMac we had here -- albeit a brand new unit -- cleared me out of the room pretty quick. It was MUCH worse than the LC 520 when it was new -- both circuit board odor (similar in scent to the WallStreet) and the colorful plastic case. Disappointingly, the iMac keyboard seemed especially smelly. If the G4 smells worse than a new iMac, it must be pretty bad.

While computer odors are a particular problem for chemically hypersensitive folks like me, there is also a general public health issue here. It is reasonably certain that hypersensitivity to chemicals is at least partially acquired through exposure, although there is almost certainly an element of genetic predisposition at work as well. I wasn't always environmentally ill, and I strongly suspect that my years spent pursuing both hobbies and livelihoods that put me in routine contact with a wide variety of aromatic chemicals, both synthetic and natural, is not coincidental to the health problems I'm having now.

Therefore, what is exposure to chemical odors from computers doing to those whom a chemically sensitive friend of mine -- a fellow car freak and computer buff who works in a university science department -- refers to as "not yet environmentally ill people"?

I expect that there is about zero attention being paid to this issue by the computer industry, but with a large and growing proportion of the population -- including many children -- using computers every day, attention should be paid to it. What is the air quality like in a classroom full of new iMacs -- or new any computers? How much do computer fumes contribute to the "sick building syndrome" phenomenon in some office buildings?

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 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, many people 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 last March 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.

The organic solvents most commonly involved were 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."

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.

Researcher and environmental illness activist Bruce Small calls environmental illness "a cultural medical phenomenon." It isn't caused by some microbial infectious agent, but rather by our lifestyle -- by the artificial environment we've fashioned for ourselves.

Of course, there are still a lot more questions than answers. Personally I would be very interested in knowing why the circuit boards in one of my telephones that I mentioned above still reek of chemicals after seven years, while the other one never smelled at all. Why did the plastics and circuit boards in the Series I WallStreet demo smell so different, and apparently less toxically, than the parts in my PowerBook G3? Was there a change in circuit board suppliers? Different batches of phenolic resin? Why did the circuit boards in the 5300 never give off any noticeable odor, even when it was new?

Would it be possible to build non-smelly computers -- or at least less smelly computers , while maintaining current and future levels of performance, if odor- reduction became a design and manufacturing objective? I think this is an issue we are going to hear a lot more about -- especially if computer makers keep building smellier and smellier computers.

For reader response to this article and more, gohere.

Charles W. Moore

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Monday, 06-Oct-2008 23:06:47 EDT