A district judge dismissed a lawsuit against Apple today in which the plaintiffs alleged that the company had willingly sold MacBooks with logic boards that were known to fail after two years. The judge said that Benedict Verceles and Uriel Marcus failed to show that Apple knew the boards were defective.
The plaintiffs have made a few big claims, including an assertion that Tim Cook was notified about the defective logic boards and did nothing to fix the issue. The judge said that since both plaintiffs were able to use their computers without issue for at least a year and a half, there was no reason to believe the boards were defective.
The complainants will have until January 22nd to amend their suit if they want to take another run at the Cupertino tech company.
This lawsuit is separate from the one that alleges Apple shipped a line of MacBook Pros in 2011 that contained defective graphics processors. That case is still in progress and was extended to include Canadian customers just last month.
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I think it’s pretty arrogant to think that Apple would willfully sell devices with known problems. History shows us that they’ve always stepped up. I’m glad to see them held to that high standard, but I’m also glad to see that these plaintiffs didn’t walk away with some kind of reward for doing so.
No, they have not always stepped up.
MacBook 2006 cracking palmrests.
MacBook Air 1st gen hinge failure.
MacBook Pro 2011 defective graphics chips
Defective iMac graphics chips and capacitors
Of course they have stepped up. You can still get your palmrest replaced in your 2006 macbok. Not sure about other 3 you mentioned, but only recently Apple free of charge fixed battery, bottom case, trackpad and upper case which all got damage due to battery expansion in one of my old 2010 Macbook pros. Needless to say long out of warranty.
Lexxkoto – MacBook cracking top cases/bezels were covered for five years from the purchase date under a quality program. The MacBook Air 1st gens also had a quality program for the hinge failure. iMac G5 logic boards that had bad capacitors were covered under a three year program, often even longer. Likely the same thing will happen for the MacBook Pro 2011 ATI issues, although most are past the typical 3 year replacement term (as with the mid 2010 15″ MacBook Pro nvidia issue). Apple has had a number of quality programs that were public facing, as well as internal articles that called for replacement by way of case-by-case discount (unibody MacBook top case/display cracking, 2009 MacBook Pro display hinge separation, etc.). History has proven you to be wrong, clearly you don’t know what you are talking about.
Danny Dudek – You cannot get your 2006 MacBook repaired since it is in “Obsolete” status. No Apple Store will touch it. The reason why they covered your repair where the battery expanded is likely because there is no program in place for it. Thus it is replaced by manager’s call. If the manager knows the store hasn’t POS discounted many repairs that week, then they may go ahead and do it. Otherwise they have to keep their numbers down, all for fear of missing out on their bonuses.
I should have added – it was not Apple Store, as there is none in Ireland where I live. It was result of a call to Apple Support where the repair approval happened, and followed by bringing it to Apple Certified Repair centre.
Where are the failure rate statistics? 2 failures, one at 18 months, one at 24 months. Are Apple portables more failure prone that the industry? If not, case dismissed.
Disappointingly, the other suit pertaining to faulty GPU’s doesn’t extend to those countless iMac 27″ (2012~2011) owners who have suffered similar problems with the first generation of leaders-free solder boards….
27″ 2011 iMacs have had a repair extension program for over 3 years due to bad GPUs…
Sad – my MacBook bought it in the summer due to a single $0.50 part failure.