As global laptop shipments surged to a record 268 million units in 2021—a 19% jump year-on-year, according to Strategy Analytics—the consumer electronics industry celebrated a historic expansion. Behind the headlines of growth and digital acceleration, however, lay a quieter, more troubling reality: one of the most persistent safety risks in modern electronics was scaling at the same pace.

Every laptop depends on a power delivery ecosystem—adapters, cables, batteries, and charging circuits—that consumers interact with daily, often without a second thought. Yet power-related failures remain among the most common causes of recalls, injuries, and property damage worldwide.

“In consumer electronics, power systems are treated as invisible infrastructure,” says Krunal Patel, a Technical Program Manager who has led global power supply and cable subsystem programs at a leading consumer electronics company. “People assume they’re safe because they’re ubiquitous. That assumption is exactly what makes failures so dangerous.”

When Small Defects Scale Into Global Risk

History offers sobering reminders of how marginal defects can escalate at scale. In 2016, Microsoft recalled approximately 2.25 million AC power cords in the U.S. and another 190,000 in Canada after reports of overheating, flames, and electrical shocks. That same year, Apple recalled two-prong AC wall plug adapters across multiple continents due to electric shock risks. Dell followed in 2019 with a recall of hybrid power adapters after reports of casing breakage that exposed live metal components. HP’s battery recalls spanned multiple years, ultimately affecting well over 100,000 units, with reports of overheating, charring, minor injuries, and property damage.

“These recalls are only the visible tip of the iceberg,” Patel notes. “They represent failures that became severe enough to cross regulatory thresholds. Countless near-misses never make headlines.”

The broader context is even more alarming. The Electrical Safety Foundation International estimates that home electrical fires cause roughly 51,000 fires annually in the United States alone, resulting in nearly 500 deaths, more than 1,400 injuries, and $1.3 billion in property damage. For a global laptop market shipping hundreds of millions of units each year, even a fractional defect rate translates into tens of thousands of potentially hazardous devices in everyday environments.

Real-World Use, Unrealistic Testing

One recurring pattern emerges across power-related failures: they rarely appear during standard laboratory testing. Instead, they surface months or years later, shaped by real-world behaviour.

“Consumers don’t use cables the way test rigs do,” Patel explains. “They wrap cords tightly, bend them at sharp angles, stuff them into backpacks, expose them to heat, cold, and repeated stress. Lab tests are controlled. Life isn’t.”

The Microsoft Surface recall underscored this gap. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, cords that were “wound too tightly, twisted, or pinched over an extended period of time” could degrade internally, leading to overheating, fire risk, or electric shock. Normal user behaviour, repeated millions of times, became the trigger for systemic failure.

HP’s battery recalls followed a similar trajectory. What began as a limited recall in early 2018 expanded twice over the following year as additional affected batteries were identified. Entire product families—ProBooks, ENVY notebooks, Pavilion x360 models, ZBooks, and thin clients—were implicated. “The compounding effect erodes consumer trust,” Patel says. “People think they’re safe, then they’re told to check again, and again.”

Moving Beyond Incremental Fixes

Industry responses to such failures have traditionally been incremental—slight material tweaks, revised handling instructions, or limited design changes. Patel describes this approach as fundamentally reactive.

“When safety is treated as a compliance checkbox, you end up managing symptoms instead of eliminating causes,” he says. “Not safety as documentation. Safety as the foundation everything else depends on.”

In his work leading power delivery and cable programs, Patel championed a different methodology: systematic Design of Experiments (DoE) applied to sustaining products, not just new designs. Instead of isolating one variable at a time, his teams tested multiple factors simultaneously—cable wrapping patterns, bend radii, connector orientations, packaging dimensions, and regional constraints.

“This isn’t guesswork,” Patel explains. “It’s about understanding how variables interact. A cable might pass durability tests in one packaging configuration and fail catastrophically in another.”

That rigor proved critical in addressing issues such as jacket retraction, where the outer cable sheath pulls back to expose internal conductors, creating short-circuit and shock risks. Standard industry tests failed to reproduce the issue. Only extended, multi-variable experimentation revealed how packaging geometry, wrapping tension, and connector alignment combined to trigger the failure over time.

Global Complexity, Global Accountability

Geography added another layer of complexity. Power supply packaging optimised for North America introduced entirely different stress patterns when adapted for European markets with tighter dimensional constraints.

“Regional variation was often treated as inevitable,” Patel says. “We refused that assumption.”

By integrating supplier feedback, coordinate measurement data, and cross-regional testing, Patel’s teams identified both interim mitigations and long-term packaging redesigns that worked across markets without compromising safety. The result was not just defect reduction, but elimination of entire failure categories.

When global supply chains fractured during the post-COVID disruptions of 2021, this safety-first philosophy proved resilient. Patel led rapid qualification of alternate suppliers while maintaining stringent quality standards.

“Resilience and safety reinforce each other,” he notes. “If you rush supplier qualification without rigorous validation, you’re just importing risk.”

Redefining the Industry’s Priorities

As the installed base of laptops and tablets continues to grow, the stakes are rising. Compressed development cycles, cost pressures, and fragmented global supply chains all work against comprehensive safety validation.

“The industry rewards speed,” Patel observes. “But physics doesn’t care about release schedules.”

The methodology he advocates—extended durability testing, multi-dimensional root-cause analysis, supplier qualification driven by quality rather than cost—demands a cultural shift. It slows development in the short term but delivers reliability at scale.

“For a global user base that depends on these devices every day, safety can’t be optional,” Patel says. “It has to be systemic. Proactive. Designed in from the beginning.”

In a world where hundreds of millions of laptops ship annually, the question is no longer whether safety failures will occur—but whether the industry is willing to address them before they do.