Nate Lanxon
Nate Lanxon is CNET UK's Senior Editor of News and Features, and covers every aspect of technology for Crave. He also enjoys popular-science books, obscure Japanese animation and plays 'technical metal' on the drums, whatever that is.
Wednesday 5 August 2009, 4:06pm
MacBook survives plummet on to concrete
Something truly horrifying happened last night. Something so horrific, so inexcusable, silence smothered the air, gagging the mouths of dozens of witnesses: I dropped my unibody MacBook from waist height on to solid concrete.
I heard gasps, but mostly I heard myself dying a little bit inside, like I'd just witnessed my own cat thrust under the sharp wheels of a passing train. Ironically, I was drinking champagne at a Dell press event at the time.
Voices gradually picked up, and friends around me bent down to pick up my keys, my wallet, my USB thumb drive, and one or two other things that had also fallen out of my upside-down bag. I, however, lifted up the corpse of my shattered, destroyed MacBook.
Except it wasn't a corpse. Nor was it destroyed. In fact, it was fine. No breakages, no smashed screen, not even a broken chassis. "This cannot be!" I thought. "How did it survive?"
To the corner of the tent I went, firing up the computer as I walked. The hard disk (one of these Seagate disks) spun up and loaded the OS. "It lives!" I declared to the crowd of people who really didn't give a goddamn.
The only physical marks were a few scuffs on one corner. Other than that, the machine was unharmed by the metre-high drop on to solid concrete. I was astounded by how tough the machine is. I thought at the very least the hard disk would've been damaged, or worse the screen. But no: all fine.
Has this happened to you? Leave any dropped-a-laptop-on-concrete stories in the comments, by all means.
Comments on this post
Both my God-daughters dropped my Titanium PowerBook. It's still in use today and it's going on for eight years old now.
Posted by Anndra on Wed 5 August, 2009 4:50 PM
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No concrete involved, but couple of weeks ago my fairly hefty 2 year old son decided to trampoline on my Dell Inspiron. Amazingly enough there was no visual damage, but not amazingly at all the hard drive had given up the ghost. Of course I could buy a whole new one and still have £400 left from the cash I saved by not getting a Macbook Pro...
Posted by sinaplenty on Wed 5 August, 2009 4:58 PM
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^ Dell fanboy
Posted by Anonymous on Wed 5 August, 2009 5:02 PM
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Never dropped a laptop but I'm constantly dropping my LG Viewty and it shows no sign of damage after 12 months - your MacBook is better than mine - there's a random dent and crack on the top of my MBP and I don't know where they came from!
Posted by Michael Davies on Wed 5 August, 2009 5:35 PM
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Same with above i don't own a laptop, but i do constantly hurt my viewty and it still only has one minute scratch on the screen as i have only had the screen protector off for a month, my friends dipped it in a glass of something (Probably alcoholic as i cant really remember it) as they thought it would be funny, Sprayed with deodorant and set on flames and catapulted on a skateboard the back is a bit scratched but the front looks almost new.
Posted by MuffinWrath on Thu 6 August, 2009 1:00 AM
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still, if you didnt buy a macbook like i suggested, you wouldnt have had anything to drop, thereby foregoing this whole ordeal.
Posted by Andy on Thu 6 August, 2009 10:46 AM
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I dropped my white Macbook from an upside down bag as well. Some stone indentation along front edge (it fell vertically front edge down) It was in sleep mode, opened lid and all seemed fine. Ram Disk utility verify, no errors so far. Will run AHT from install disk tonight. My heart sank when it happened.
Posted by Peter on Tue 29 September, 2009 3:22 AM
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