15 Million Toshiba Laptop Adapters Recalled Over Burn and Fire Risks (cnn.com) 20
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:
Dynabook Americas, the company formerly known as Toshiba, has recalled 15.5 million Toshiba laptop AC adapters over potential burn and fire hazards.
The company said it received 679 reports of the recalled AC adapters overheating or catching on fire, melting and burning, including 43 reports of minor burn injuries. Consumers should stop using the adapters immediately and contact them for a free replacement, Dynabook Americas said.
The recall applies to AC adapters sold both alongside Toshiba personal laptop computers and sold separately, with date codes ranging between April 2008 through December 2012. The adapters were manufactured in China. More than 60 models are part of the recall. The company published a webpage listing the impacted model numbers and serial numbers for the adapters.
Gatner points out the adapters are for "very old models," so "it's only a very small percentage of the population that is still using them."
The article cites figures from Gartner showing that while Toshiba once led the laptop market, it now makes up about 1%. "Nowadays, Lenovo dominates the category with 25%, followed by HP (22%), Dell (17%) and Apple (9%)."
The company said it received 679 reports of the recalled AC adapters overheating or catching on fire, melting and burning, including 43 reports of minor burn injuries. Consumers should stop using the adapters immediately and contact them for a free replacement, Dynabook Americas said.
The recall applies to AC adapters sold both alongside Toshiba personal laptop computers and sold separately, with date codes ranging between April 2008 through December 2012. The adapters were manufactured in China. More than 60 models are part of the recall. The company published a webpage listing the impacted model numbers and serial numbers for the adapters.
Gatner points out the adapters are for "very old models," so "it's only a very small percentage of the population that is still using them."
The article cites figures from Gartner showing that while Toshiba once led the laptop market, it now makes up about 1%. "Nowadays, Lenovo dominates the category with 25%, followed by HP (22%), Dell (17%) and Apple (9%)."
Toshiba once had an excellent product (Score:2)
Maybe in the 90s. Been a while since i've even seen one. For a bit they were selling a lot of glued-together supposedly ruggedized laptops (toughbooks) that were less actually rugged than a commodity Dell. They looked cool so the government and its vendors bought a lot of them.
I know they were glued together because I had to disassemble a few.
Woops, Panasonic (Score:2)
Toughbooks were Panasonic. Another sterling brand.
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They started out as a great rugged laptop, but then they slowly migrated to being the "business line" of laptops as I've seen toughbooks that ended up looking a lot more like regular laptops than ruggedized ones.
Likely what happened is the ruggedized ones attracted all sorts of customers, but they didn't want ruggedized laptops because they were big and bulky, and wanted more normal laptops because they were going to be used in more normal places.
My dad had
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The Lincoln?
Obviously cheapest possible crap (Score:2)
Because unless you really try to save every last penny, these come with overheat protection right in the regulator chip. Obviously a bit of over-engineering is also a good idea. Classical case of MBA nil wit "save a penny lose a million".
As to Toshiba in general, they are a has-been in the computer space. Recently bought some external Toshiba disks. Turns out their SMR firmware was so incredibly bad that a full overwrite would have taken 40 days. Since I had customer data on them, I had no choice but to do
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They probably used a separate power MOSFET, rather than one built into the controller chip. Maybe incorrectly coupled to the temperature sensor, or maybe the sensor (likely an NTC resistor) can age and fail.
Could also be something like aged capacitors leaking and the schmoo (technical term) causing a short between the low voltage side and mains.
There are lots of potential failure modes here.
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Probably no NTC or other sensor in there at all as that would require extra circuitry. External FETs usually do not get fitted with temperature sensors in small PSUs. One of the main reasons to use integrated switchers as they come with temperature sensors right next to the power FET.
My guess would be somebody simulated this and found it "should be fine" and forgot about ageing. And capacitors age. Not that they leak (the capacitor plague was a specific issue with defective, stolen electrolyte, not a genera
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I think you are underestimating the difficulty of building a power supply to last 15 years. A typical high-reliability electrolytic capacitor life is 5000 hours. In 15 years, you only need a duty cycle of 4% to get to 5000 hours, about an hour a day. It's probably not operating at max rated temperature of voltage, so even 10x uprating will still get you to 10 hours a day. I grant that it should probably fail safe, but almost anything can potentially happen and defeat any protections in exceedingly rare com
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I am not talking about a PSU that lasts 15 years at all. I am talking about one that does not have the failure mode of "melts or starts to burn". And there is no "should" about it, this is a "must" requirement. Quite obviously, and the recall should make that even more obvious. The manufacturer may well become liable if a house burns down or somebody gets seriously injured because of this badly designed PSU.
Incidentally, standard integrated linear regulators _also_ come with thermal protection. But these ar
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You can insist on "must" if you want, but there will always be outlier failures that have unexpected side effects. Absolute certainty is not something that happens in the real world, you demanding it does not effect that.
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Actually, the law insists on this. PSU design is not an arcane subject. It is instead well-understood by experts and that makes things melting or catching fire gross negligence.
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You can make all the laws you want, there will *always* , repeat, *always* be corner cases. It's only negligence when you ignore best practice, that does not guarantee success.
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You cannot admit you are wrong, can you? How pathetic. A mass-deployed PSU is not a "corner case". Fire-safety is not optional in products targeted at regulars users. A vendor only das a mass-recall if they have to. Deal with it.
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I am not wrong, so why would I say I was? My point, since you obviously missed it, was that passing laws and "insisting" on things doesn't make them come true. There are *always* corner cases and once in 10 million chances, you cannot mandate them away and you cannot engineer them away.
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You are just trying to move the goalposts because what you claimed was crap, but you are incapable of admitting that. The problem under discussion is a design flaw in a well known technology that has been deployed on mass-scale top regular end-users. And you are clueless enough to claim that fire safety in that type equipment is a "nice to have" feature. No. It is not. It is mandatory. And the law makes it that.
You know, if you were one of my engineering students, I would just fail you for gross incompetenc
**Sigh!!!** (Score:1)
Sorry guys, the Quake server is gonna be down for a little while.
12 to 16 year old power adapters? (Score:5, Insightful)
679 reports out of over 15 million?
I wonder how many 12+ year old laptop power adapters from other manufacturers have only a 0.004% "bad" failure rate?
Sounds like they should be giving out awards instead of recalls...
(I have two Toshiba laptops from those years - different power adapter codes, but pretty much zero issues since I bought them.)
Had two Toshiba latops (Score:2)
Cheap Walmart Laptop (Score:1)
I upgraded it to Windows 10, for some reason. Dog slow. Tried Manjaro Linux on it, still didn't find it too useful. I even upgraded the RAM to 4GB from the 2GB it started with, and gave it a solid state drive when both were cheap enough to not care. Original battery barely lasts 30 minutes anymore, wasn't maintained when stored and it was frequently left to completely discharge.
Toshiba Satellite C655D-S5202