[joseph_cooney]

Yesterday when some apple users said their Macbook battery life had been impacted by the Mavericks upgrade the consensus on HN was that "people blame all kinds of problems on software upgrades". When some Dell users say their laptops smell funny, then Dell has a QA problem.

[rurounijones]

Hard to blame software upgrades for urine smells on new laptops.

I also think users are probably better at diagnosing "The keyboard smells like piss" than software implications on battery life

[Gigablah]

"The keyboard smells like piss, therefore it's Dell's fault"

[rurounijones]

As opposed to....

[Gigablah]

Fedex? Your cat? I dunno. We don't know if it's a particular batch or all of them uniformly smell like that.

[rurounijones]

Many people reporting the problem so it is not a cat unless it is very well travelled and has a grudge against Dell laptops.

It could be that every owner has a cat and they all feel the need to mark dell laptops as their property but that seems unlikely.

If you read the comments you will see that they did not all immediately reek but it happened over a few days which rules out a batch getting watered en route since they would stink when removed from box (and probably suffer other problems, Laptops + liquid do not mix)

That is even assuming said liquid could even make it to the laptop through all the packaging.

It sounds far more like a reaction to hands + chemicals in/on keyboard or maybe chemicals used to create keyboard gradually reacting to heat of laptop.

Especially since people have provided links in threads detailing how this can happen.

So occam's razor, something in the manufacturing process; even if it is just one batch.

AKA Dell's fault.

[ketralnis]

Was it a software upgrade that caused the laptops to smell like cat piss?

[stock_toaster]

That would be one hell of a bug.

[interTrode]

I, uh... I'd like to take some time and point out the following implicit logic veiled beneath your posit of pro-Apple fanboyism bias.

  Even if it's a software update, Apple bears the full brunt
  of all the acrimony, because when it comes to Macintosh 
  products, Apple takes credit for the whole thing, 
  regardless of  where the failure originates, be it 
  hardware or software.

Apple controls The Spice in that scenario (and thus, the universe). They are at fault for everything that sucks no matter what.