Magnets are funny things. They are used all the time in various industries, including laptops. Since they are used in laptops, they must be totally harmless, right? Not so fast.
There are theories and also stories around using or storing laptops near magnets. During the research, I noticed that one group of people said that laptops are completely harmless while others act like they are a mass destruction weapon to the laptops. As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Here is the short answer:
Magnets do not damage a laptop in the vast majority of the time, especially regular-size magnets. However, if your laptop has an HDD, you might want to avoid placing magnets near since they are more prone to damage. To seriously damage a laptop, you would need a giant magnet.
Dont go anywhere because next, I will cover the following:
- How magnets actually affect laptops
- Do laptops contain magnets?
- Can magnets turn off the laptop?
- Can magnets damage Macbooks?
- Are magnetic sleeves safe for laptops?
Without further ado, let’s jump straight in!
How magnets actually affect laptops
Here we will first examine the connection between magnets and electrical devices such as laptops.
In today’s times, most electronic circuits don’t have a concern with magnets, unless they’re fast-moving magnets, which could cause some stray electric currents. Magnets are an issue for magnetic tapes, floppy discs, and other kinds of magnetic data storage like HDD.
The first thing we should ask ourselves when we discuss this, is what size of magnet we are talking about? This is crucial due to the following reason.
A really big magnet can destroy just about any electrical device, especially laptops and computers. They can even kill an LED screen. However, we are talking about EXTREMELY LARGE magnets you most probably dont have in your house.
On the other hand, if we are talking about small magnets your children play with, you dont have to worry about them at all.
The only potential issue I see is with hard drives.
Can magnets damage the laptop’s hard drive?
Yes, magnets can both damage hard drives and also erase the whole data stored on them. However, the magnets need to be strong enough to do it.
Here is one interesting story about magnets and hard drives from my friend.
He worked in tech customer service and their policy for laptops and all such data collection products were that the data belonged to the customer and it was their duty to back it up. For any issue related to the memory storage device, their instructions were to reformat and restore the product to factory settings.
So, they had this customer who sent in her laptop three times, and each time they received it the hard drive was so damaged that they couldn’t reformat it. They had to substitute it with a new one.
By the time it came in the third time the lady was threatening all kinds of legal action if they didn’t give her a brand new laptop. In the meantime, he was also talking to his technical support group and they told him that they once had an unusually increased number of hard drive failures for a brief period.
After extensive investigation, they finally found that a vendor was giving away a free carrying pouch as a promotion. It had a magnetic clasp, and depending on which direction the clasp was facing when you inserted the laptop, the hard drive would be totally erased and couldn’t be reformatted by the normal formatting procedure. The high-level magnetic field most probably corrupted the MBR area which made the hard drive unreadable.
Here are some tests
This article would not be complete without analyzing some tests that have been done on this very topic. So let’s get right into it!
Test no.1
The first one is done by Johnny Phillips in 2013. He first started with two elliptical magnets which kids use to play with. During the test, nothing really happened even when he was moving them just below the HDD.
The next magnet was 3 times more powerful than the first one. Again, nothing really happened. Then, he wrapped a coil of wire around the same magnet which increased the strength by another 30%. Nothing happened.
And then things started to get very interesting. He went to the company that builds massive electrical magnets used for picking up cars. After 20 seconds of strong magnetic force, it was time to see the results. The laptop would not turn on so they sent it to the computer data retrieval company. The HDD was completely destroyed and all the data have been erased.
Test no.2
In the video, you can a guy trying the same thing. However, something different happened. First, he started going around the laptop with a very small magnet. When he was near the laptop screen, the laptop went into sleep mode. This is because that was the area where the Reer Switch is located (more about it later).
After that, he added a few more magnets and tried again. Suddenly, the laptop shut down. It was due to the HDD failure.
Test no.3
Warped Perception did a great job of doing this one in which he wanted to specifically test HDD and SSD. While running Minecraft, he placed a small magnet directly on the HDD. Nothing happened. Then he used a 20lb rare earth magnet and still nothing happened. After that, he went on to the 40 lb magnet. The game was shut down however, the PC was still running.
What happened was when the magnet was on the HDD, the platter slow down almost to a stop but when he removed the magnet, the hard drive continued normally.
Next was the laptop with an SSD. Nothing happened.
Can magnets damage a MacBook?
Since MacBooks are not so much different than other laptops, the same principle applies.
In short, magnets have no substantial effect on SSD drive-based Macs, but keep in mind that this is NOT the case for a MacBook with a spinning hard drive as a magnet could delete data on that hard drive. Here’s why.
Magnets can probably impact speaker sound (or cause speaker sound) as the speakers have tiny magnets. It assumably won’t harm the speaker (it could pull the speaker cone beyond its capacity and break it if there is sufficiently travel room), but as lots of experience proves, you might hear strange sounds. Since there are no other moving parts and DRAM etc, are not magnetic, there are rare things in current MacBooks that are impacted by strong magnets.
Also, note that MacBooks include permanent magnets in their screen and base to allow the screen to turn off when closed, so having magnets nearby is not an issue.
Do laptops have magnets in them?
Ok, we know the potential effect of magnets on laptops. Now let’s see whether laptops actually contain any magnets.
To my knowledge, laptops contain some amount of magnets in their display lids, hard drives, and speakers. Display lids use them to detect whether the laptop is closed or not, speakers use it for moving the cone while HDD requires magnets to control the movement of the heads.
Namely, every speaker (including laptops) has an electrical current. So when the current is changing, it creates a magnetic field. Then, to make the speakers cone move, you need something to create an opposing magnetic field that will create vibrations which are the sounds we hear. What is that something? The answer is magnets.
In the case of the laptop lid, it contains magnets that will signal the Reed Switch (more about it later) to turn on/off the system. Finally, hard drives in laptops also contain magnets because magnetism stores information even when the power is switched off.
If there is some other laptop component containing a magnet that I didn’t mention, let me know!
Can magnets turn off the laptop?
Well, yes. Here is why.
Your laptop requires a way to detect when the lid is closed and the best way to do so is to embed a magnet in the lid to send the signal. Let me explain.
Most laptops today contain something known as a Reed Switch. It is an electronic component that switches the laptop display on/off. Your laptop lid has a magnet and whenever you close your laptop, the switch detects it and switches the display off to conserve power.
In other words, when you close the lid of your laptop, there are magnets that hold it together and then your system puts your laptop in sleep mode after it detects the interaction between two magnets.
Here is the interesting thing. If you put the magnet near the right spot you fool the laptop as it thinks that the lid is closed due to the interaction between two magnets and as a result your OS puts your laptop in sleep mode. Check the video below:
As you can see, you can turn off the laptop by placing magnets near the Reer Switch that will either turn on/off the display.
Are magnetic sleeves safe for laptops?
We know that laptops are expensive and if you are worried about scuffs, spills, or drops you might be interested in buying a good laptop sleeve that will provide you with an extra layer of protection. However, lots of them have magnetic. Are they safe then?
Magnetic sleeves are completely safe for laptops because the magnets inside them are so weak that they won’t have any effect on your laptop.