How to thoroughly waterproof a Macbook?

I am just now coming to know the hard limits of water destroying equipment. I don't know if it's realistic to be able to have my Macbook as a floatable rubber ducky in the bath in this day & age, but products like Liquipel and commercials of scuba divers using iPads have me curious.

Is liquipel the best protection on the market? Are there other custom shops that could do anything to make a MacBook either resistant to liquid or even waterproof?

Solution 1:

I'm going to stick my neck and say that you cannot do this. No matter what materials you have to hand, your MacBook requires open access to the internals via vents and grills etc for fans to push unwanted air out, or suck cooler air in etc. You can't safely just block all this up. You can get a wide range of keyboard covers to allow you to type with wet/dirty hands etc, but protecting the entire unit isn't really practical at all. Servers are amenable to being bathed in mineral oil but that requires special cabling, removal of all blowers and potentially modifying the heat sink depending on the specifics of the CPU and coolant temperatures.

• http://www.grcooling.com
• http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Server-Cooling-Hardware-mineral-oil,17348.html

Solution 2:

it's a very interesting prospect and my first thought was flashflood by nanostate

It would require fully dismantling the device which is difficult in itself but I doubt this would work on a whole macbook anyway because the screen would be hard to coat properly. dismantling a macbook ain't an easy task!

Then there's the issue of how the heat generated by the processor and components would affect the coating, it could well negate the protection or worse damage the parts. And much like the previous answer the fans would be an issue the moment submersion occured because water is far more viscous than air so they'd burn out or be serious damaged by the water.

In regards to the point made about mineral oil submersion, this is totally possible because of the nonconductive nature of the chosen oils. Amari made this amazing fully submerged custom pc that used fluorinert and I remember reading about how hard it was to find pumps powerful enough to push the liquid around, once fully loaded the computer weighed something like 100KG!

So really a conventional laptop isn't something that could be easily made waterproof however because of the nature of ultrabooks using super low power processors it's only a matter of time before Apple release a Macbook Air without vents or fans making this a more feasible idea! You can guarantee the Liquipel guys will have attempted this or will in the future as no doubt there could be a lot of money to be made in waterproofing a laptop, I say this as I'm sitting outside and a dark rainy looking cloud looms above haha.