It’s more serious than laptops committing suicide in bags. It’s, anything with a high-energy battery can short itself and cause a fire. Worse, it could be malware or hardware. At this point I am surprised the vulnerability hasn’t been used by anyone.
The law is that you can only bring aboard Li-ion batteries of size 100 watt-hrs or smaller on any airplane (https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...).
I think the airline crews are confident they can handle 100 watt-hours worth of burning, but no more than that!
I'm not sure if they are smothering the fire. The strategy seems like it's just a safe place to keep the fire until later.
You won't have buckets and buckets of water on an airplane. You need a solution to safely contain the fire and keep the passengers safe.
What is bad, because if there were one platform that would avoid this problem it would be Macs. But anyway, my phone does that once in a while too... Phones also shouldn't do it.
It's not even a hard problem to solve. There is a single piece of code that wakes a device up, you just have to not call it everywhere. If you don't control all the code, just require some kind of permission, and don't go granting it to the team that writes the system updater.
I've now had three generations of XPS 13 with Ubuntu. They're not perfect (the battery drains over 3 or 4 days instead of overnight) but overall my experience has been much better.