Boy wrecks £22k worth of MacBooks by weeing on them An 11-year-old boy has been charged with vandalism after relieving himself on a cartful of Apple MacBooks at school, causing $36,000 (£22,170) worth of damage. The computers, the property of Upper Allen Elementary School in Pennsylvania, were destroyed beyond repair, local publication PennLive reports. Manneken pis wears …
I am told that Mac have internal moisture sensors that "go off" when dampened and are used by their service people to deny warranty claims. It may be that a kid with a good aim didn't actually destroy the Macs, just dampened them enough to void their warranties. Although to describe them therefore as being "destroyed beyond repair" may just be a ploy to get the insurance (or the child's parents) to pay out.
Just one tiny drop of rain on my iPhone is enough to invalidate the warranty, so scale that up to a few large drops on a Mac and the kid could probable wee a Apple store full of them into oblivion.
Just imagine how many an El Reg reader could wee off after a Friday feed of beer.
£22,000 worth of Macbooks. Now, being educationally minded, these probably aren't Macbook Pros but one of the older, pre-Air sorts. Now, assuming the school cough about £1k per laptop, factoring in bulk buying and less taxes, etc, it's 22 Macbooks.
In an adult, it can contain about 300ml, according to wikipedia or in another word's a Coke can's worth. In a child it's probably about the size of a Capri Sun.
I'm just trying to work out he would have arranged the Macbooks in order to ensure they all get soaked to bust the warranties. If he put them all in a huge stack, i.e. 22 ontop of each other, would he have been able to fire up to reach the ones on the top?
But then if he laid them out on the floor in a 4x5 grid arrangement, would there be enough surface area to cover them all....?
Exactly right but this was Pennsylvania so with the educational discount even a MacBook Air is under $1k so even if they were of the Air variety we'd be talking 36 of them maybe even 40+ in bulk. Either way it was probably enough for entire classroom. Of course why they hand out laptops to the kiddies is beyond me. Perhaps they've never heard of thin clients or even a Mac Mini.
> Although to describe them therefore as being "destroyed beyond repair" may just be a ploy to get the insurance (or the child's parents) to pay out.
Well if you were to bring them back to Apple for repair, they would indeed be declared "damaged beyond repair", and out of warranty too, even if they were working perfectly well. Having 22 grands worth of kit that the manufacturer (sorry, rebrander) will absolutely refuse to service no matter what the cause of the (future) defect is probably a risk that the school is not willing to take. Can't blame them.
I'm astounded that nobody has mentioned that:
Police charged the (eleven [11] year old) boy with institutional vandalism and criminal mischief and are turning him over to the Cumberland County Juvenile Probation Department.
Eleven, yes 11, year old boy pushed through the septic justice (sic) system. FFS!
Really FFFingS!?
That's nothing - there are plenty of cases in the US of children under the age of ten being arrested for what is really just bad behaviour.
Even worse! In some parts of the US, breaking the school dress code or behaviour policy is a criminal offence. Kids go to court - and jail - for dressing wrong.
A while back my clients had a small fire that resulted in the fire service spraying gallons of water over 12 identical computers. When they had finished there liberal wetting I aquirred the sodden computers. It was all above board with the insurance company....(sort of)
Out of the 12 rather high spec units 11 of them lived on, The 1 that refused did however have a working drive and memory.
*apologies for my title
Urine isn't just water - I believe the urea will break down into ammonia when exposed to air which, apart from the smell, may be very damaging to circuit boards (it dissolves copper very efficiently for example). Very small amounts of the wrong kind of fluid can be catastrophic to electronics.
"Very small amounts of the wrong kind of fluid can be catastrophic to electronics."
The best spillage event I ever dealt with was the Cola Keyboard. A young lady brought a laptop to me that she had spilled cola (lots of) into the keyboard area. I asked what she did next (turn off? etc) she said she carried on using it until the keyboard got to sticky and crunchy at which point she poured water into the keyboard to fix the crunchiness. Whilst pouring water into the keyboard solved the crunchy key dilemma it completely killed the laptop. Britain's brightest and all that!
Many a mixing desk in a radio station has had its life ended by people tipping Coca Cola onto it. Gets into the holes on the faders and corrodes the circuits as the jocks are too frightened to report it. They just mop up the spill and hope for the best.
Although the prize has to go to the mixing desk at a radio station which had some failing faders. When the engineer took it apart he found the fader tracks gummed up with a suspicious looking white powder.......
I spilled a large glass of white wine into my dell laptop keyboard, I tipped it out again and mopped up what i could with kitchen towels. Aside from a sticky backspace key, it's perfectly fine. All the backlighting still works too.
I think it depends on how watertight your keyboard underlay is, and how quickly you get it out again. I thought macbooks were supposed to be quite good in that regard.
Urine is much more conductive than water. If any of these laptops had a viable battery pack and the urine got inside they are pretty much dead. The only thing to save kit in this case is to wash it ASAP with lots of deionized water and let it dry.
However, there is just no way a minor can relieve himself successfully over 20+ laptops. Granted there is an obesity pandemic, but someone with "capacity" that BIG. Give me a break. Someone is seriously taking the piss here. Literally.
Gin & tonic is worse, it eats away the wiring, fast.
Had to laugh when one user came in, the night before his wife handed him his 6 month old son while she went to get a Nappy excited by getting a cuddle from Daddy while he worked his Son showed his pleasure by washing the keyboard.
Being an engineer he got a new laptop keyboard to fit himself and an accelerated replacement was organised. Out there someone has a second hand laptop with a Wee problem (laptops are disposed under WEE directive to licensed contractor, we forgot to mention the accident).
two stacks of 11 very easy to wee over by an 11 year old boy, remember playing fire hose at the urinals?
They are a bio hazard they have to write them off.
Since we're comparing spills...
This one is NOT for the weak of stomach.
After a particularly heavy Friday night sesh many years ago, involving Buckfast, rum and whiskey, I had a somewhat unfortunate "passing out and vomiting profusely" moment. My mate's Amiga A500 was right there at the epicenter of the mess.
It ended up being immersed in water to wash the crud out, and dried for several days. The keyboard never worked again, but everything else was operable. We even used it to do graphics for a game we were working on a few years later.
A couple of years ago, our flat was broken into, and the scrotes tipped a desktop PC onto its front and poured water into it. They probably did this because they thought it might be recording them via the connected webcam. Despite being switched off. After an overnight drying out, the machine worked fine.
Skip forward to two weeks ago, and the wife poured hot tea into her laptop. I left it upside down for a few hours (the laptop that is) and it also worked fine.
Both machines were Dells - freebies from work when we upgraded. Surely if they can survive a thorough drenching, so should a Macbook?
Of the Mac laptop hardware failures that I'm aware of, 3 were coffee-keyboard interface problems and the last one was a duff hard drive. PC laptops, even cheap ones, seems to be a lot more resistant to spillages - though we do have users who are capable of killing anything via a generous application of food products.
Interesting point re resistance of various laptops to fluids: I spilled a bunch of water on my relatively new Toshiba, and it turned out the (no longer typing properly) keyboard was a sealed component, itself with what seemed a de facto seal around its edges, which more or less prevented any water seeping further into the machine. I replaced the keyboard unit at a cost of £10, and the whole getup works just fine.
Put my wireless keyboard in the dishwasher, batteries removed obviously. Once the cycle is complete; shake vigorously and place in airing cupboard, leave overnight +a working day; job's a good un! Sparkly keyboard -cat hair -beer -coffee -spittle (from the occasional FotW entry) &c.
Having previously worked in a hot desk environment using crufty, crusty, shitty, disgusting & hairy keyboards, I can say it's a pity their dishwasher was only used for crockery.
considering the how polarized the readership here is about Macs, maybe this kid lurks amongst our very forums. I shudder at the thought and indeed feel my bladder loosening...
Aside from that this article was most entertaining on a dreary Monday morning. Though I confess "Badum tish" was too much for my English-as-a-second-language understanding.
I think there's a couple of drum hits in there too.
My wife spilled hot tea onto my Macbook a couple of years ago and it instantly died. I tried for several days to carefully dry it out but it would not boot. I did eventually revive it but it required a a strip down and clean (it was dry inside by this point). It also needed a new battery and wifi card.
Under current health and safety laws no half way sane headteacher could ever authorise the use of a laptop (whatever the make) that has, or has potentially, been peed on. Just imagine headlines like 'teaching assistant forced to use contaminated hardware now psychologically unable to work with IT equipment and demands $3.8 million in damages' or 'I wasn't told that my children were touching [insert racial derogative of choice]-urine in this school, mum complains, sues council/ town/ board of education'.
The write-off is perfectly understandable, the insurance will pay; and with a bit of luck (and some IPA flushing) you can get a cheap, usable MacBook off ebay.
If you ever put a keyboard into a dishwasher, make sure that:
- You use a 'cold' program. Most keyboards today have some kind of 'membrane' made of silicon or plastic that could be damaged by hot water.
- You don't use dishwasher's 'salts', as they could corrode the metallic parts -springs, ...- of the keyboard.
- Make sure to let it dry completely before using it. It'll dry faster if you disassemble it first.
I learned this the hard way. :-(
Re 'cart' I suspect this might be one of those custom-made 'charging carts' designed for educational establishments. That would mean that every single Mac was powered in some way, creating some problems.
In tema of 'trauma', anybody working in a school and claiming to be traumatised by child urine seriously needs firing for the good of humanity.
The USA truly is a melting pot, taking in and welcoming all creeds and races. I would have never guessed that in PA of all places there would be an integrated colony of xenomorphs (Aliens from Alien franchise). How else can you explain piss that can destroy 30 laptops? I think they would have mentioned that it shorted out the batteries, causing them to catch fire, the fire then spreading to and burning through the entire stack... but that sort of detail would have made it into the news report.
So what you do is take them apart, carefully rinse them and put them back together (after you let them air dry).
It isn't just about the warranty or whether the devices physically work any more - it is a liability issue.
You 'clean' the laptops and put them back in use, and then a child gets a shock from one for some random reason. The school would not be able to show due diligence with the devices, and as such would be very open to a civil case against them.
Not to mention not many kids would want to work with laptops that were known to have been peed on.
My Macbook accidentally came into contact with a small amount of water. After drying out it appeared to work OK when plugged into the mains except for the charging indicator. The Mac repair shop said that the motherboard showed signs of corrosion and needed to be replaced (at enormous cost). This was confirmed by the insurance company who said that it was not worth repairing. It was a basic model about 6 years old and the replacement value was deemed to be £999 (cost of a similar model at Currys). I was shocked and the insurers said that unlike most consumer electronics, Apple products do not fall in price; they improve in specification. Two things I have learned:a) Macbooks are very susceptible to liquid damage b) if you are going to go Mac then you need good insurance.
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