The recent problems with spontaneously combusting lithium-ion batteries in Dell and Apple computers appears to have turned up in IBM Thinkpads now.
the ThinkPad (which was quoted to be an IBM, not a Lenovo) apparently had a number of death throes as the fire went through various phases, until eventually a United employee busted out the fire extinguisher and laid the laptop to rest. Apparently the machine’s owner already checked its battery against the recalls and it was not listed — and why would it be? IBM and Lenovo aren’t flagged for bad batteries — yet.
I cleaned up the photo a bit to get a better look. Based on the battery placement and connectors it looks quite a lot like my T42P. It will be interesting to see whether that battery was an original IBM-supplied battery or from a 3rd party. My notebook has a Sanyo battery. The recent battery fires have all been in Sony-manufactured units. There are also a lot of low quality generic batteries available in Asia, but the Thinkpad is mostly purchased by corporate and consulting users, who are likely to stick with original equipment.
Apple showed their “iTV” box at today’s media event. It’s intended to connect downloaded video to home televisions. Today was a pre-announcement, for a planned release next spring, so you can’t go out and buy one.
In any case, I can tell already that the iTV would probably pass the spouse test in our household. We have gone through an assortment of roll-your-own video and media server projects over the past few years, but it usually ends up that I’m the only one that can get BeyondTV / MythTV / Freevo / whatever running, which generally defeats the purpose.
By the spring, there will probably be competing form factors based on Vista as well. In any case, I’m sure they will be far more acceptable to the rest of our household than the DIY approach.
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