Now I know why Apple never refers to their Mac notebooks as laptops. Put a hot notebook on your lap, guys, and the heat could affect your future family of Mac users.
That’s right, the heat from a notebook, balanced on a laptop for prolonged periods, could affect your reproductive capability. Researchers say 15 minutes of warmer temperatures emanating from a hot Mac could impact male fertility.
Your Mac As Sperm Killer
None other than Reuters Health has shed some light on what a hot Mac notebook can do to a young man’s reproductive area.
We’re talking heat from a notebook placed on a laptop for an extended period of time.
Researchers have found that notebooks can warm sensitive male body parts beyond what is considered a safe level.
Safe for what? Safe for normal sperm quality. Safe for effective human reproduction. It may sound crazy, but it’s true. Three words: Class. Action. Lawsuit.
Frederik Joelving describes the research and the problem:
The researchers hooked thermometers to the scrotums of 29 young men who were balancing a laptop on their knees. They found that even with a lap pad under the computer, the men’s scrotums overheated quickly.
More than half of all Macs sold in recent years are MacBooks and MacBook Pro models, each with screaming hot Intel Dual Core CPUs inside. Placed on a man’s lap for 15 minutes could produce enough heat to cause, uh, problems.
To hold a laptop on your knees, however, you need to sit still with your legs closed. After one hour in this position, the researchers found that men’s testicle temperature had risen by up to 2.5 C.
By calling their Mac portable line notebooks instead of laptops is Apple directly avoiding potential health issues and liability? Certainly Apple is not advocating the use of MacBooks on laps.
As it turned out, leg position played a far bigger role. When the men sat with their legs spread wide—made possible only by placing the computer on a large lap pad—they could keep their testicles cooler. But it still took less than 30 minutes before they began overheating.
Ouch.
An overheated scrotum does not make for good sperm production, so say the doctors. There’s a term for that. Scrotal Hyperthermia.
Is there a silver lining in the cloud (so to speak)?
What about the guys who tell their lady friends that they’re basically infertile because of heavy laptop usage while in college or at work?
We have a couple of MacBook models at home (Pro and none Pro), used while we’re on the road. I use the desktop iMac while my husband uses the Mac notebooks. We’ve had three children in five years so I’m not worried much about Mac’s impact on spousal fertility.
Still, what’s the impact long term on millions and millions of scrotums worldwide? Is Apple potentially liable because there’s no warning sticker on a Mac notebook?
