Australian Mac site MacTalk recently had a pretty incredible post on its forums. A MacBook owner’s battery caught fire, resulting in some severe damage to his machine:

Here’s the bulk of the post accompanying the photos:

3am last night. I woke up to my housemate screaming (yelling “Matty!”) and the dog barking. She fell asleep on the couch in the back lounge of our house. I jumped out of bed and raced out thinking that maybe somebody had come through the back door or something.

As I was running I saw a fire. At first I thought that the lamp had fallen and set fire to the curtain. As I got closer I realised it was my mac book …. burning! I picked it up and blew on it and swung it around to put the flames out. The book shelf it was sitting on was burnt and there were a couple of magazines that were on fire too. I quickly put those out and calmed down.

First point to make - check regularly that your smoke alarm works - ours didn’t go off.
Second point (and this is the scary one) - we were damn lucky not to have a house burnt to the ground. I have been out for most of the weekend and this night was the only night I had it charging.

What actually happened?
I have noticed for the past 3 weeks the battery life has been poor. I was only getting an hour to an hour and a half from it (compared to over 3 hours). I also notice the battery symbol had an X showing a couple of times but a restart would sort that out. One last thing I noticed over the last few days was when the battery was fully charged and on the power, it would flicker between 99% and 100% constantly. Nothing would fix this and I was planning on getting it looked at very soon.

So, Saturday afternoon I watched a tv show (from a ripped dvd) on the macbook. The battery goes down to 21%. I close all programs and shut the lid. It was in sleep mode - the light was pulsing. I usually plug it in for a charge but I didn’t this time and head out for the weekend (damn lucky as I would have come home to rubble). Sunday night, I come home and open the lid. It doesn’t wake. I plug the power in and it fires up but showing 0% on the battery symbol. I surf the net using safari for 30 minutes and the battery is charging up as usual. I close all programs and shut the lid. Again, I always make sure it’s in sleep mode before putting it down. I set it on the book shelf and leave it to charge.

And we are back at the 3am incident. My housemate said she heard it hissing like a steam valve, then smoke started pouring out of it and a couple of seconds later, a very large flash fire started. I’m sure you have read about these and seen the dell video. This is what happened to my macbook.

The battery is swollen and burnt so it’s definitely the battery that exploded and caught fire. The macbook is melted on the bottom and severely charred (along with my bookshelves, books, magazines and the wall). The space bar is melted as is the track pad. The screen has been damaged a little too.

…

I bought it at the end of June last year so it’s still under 12 month warranty.
Strange thing is, there was no symptoms like excessive heat or deformation of the battery or anything like that at all. I also checked quite a while ago to see if my battery was one of the recall units. It was not.

Word back from Apple hasn’t been reported by the owner of the machine, but this could certainly be a bad sign. Just to reiterate some of the the original poster said, it’s always a good idea to make sure your smoke detectors have working batteries and are functional, and though nobody is good about this, it really is a good policy to not leave charging electronics unattended.

The big question, of course, is whether this is a fluke incident or something that other MacBooks could suffer from. We haven’t heard anything else about flaming MacBooks, and the machine in the story is about eight months old, so here’s hoping this is just a one off. More bad publicity for Apple about bad batteries would be very unfortunate, both for Apple, and those of us that don’t want airlines to ban the use of MacBooks on planes.

Apple has generally responded swiftly to battery issues, due to the serious safety risks from flaming computers, so we expect if this problem has affected more than a handful of people that we’ll hear something from Apple very soon. In the meantime, keep an eye out for symptoms like those described: reduced battery life and inconsistent recognition of the battery by the computer, and if you have these symptoms, be very careful about leaving your MacBook unattended.

Filed under: MacBook News, Troubleshooting