“Apple Inc won the dismissal on Thursday of a lawsuit accusing it of defrauding consumers by selling MacBook laptop computers that contained ‘logic boards’ it knew were defective, and which routinely failed within two years,” Jonathan Stempel reports for Reuters.
“U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said the plaintiffs, Uriel Marcus and Benedict Verceles, failed to show that Apple made ‘affirmative misrepresentations,’ despite citing online complaints and Apple marketing statements calling the laptops ‘state of the art’ or the ‘most advanced” on the market,'” Stempel reports. “‘Plaintiffs have failed to allege that Apple’s logic boards were unfit for their ordinary purposes or lacked a minimal level of quality,’ Alsup wrote. ‘Both plaintiffs were able to adequately use their computers for approximately 18 months and two years, respectively.'”
Stempel reports, “A separate and still pending lawsuit in California accuses Apple of defrauding consumers by selling MacBook Pro laptops in 2011 that contained defective graphic cards, causing screen distortions and system failures.”
Read more in the full article here.
Amatuer lawyers with no technical knowledge whatsoever wrote up a stupid ridoculous complaint.
Yes, there were real problems with this mbp but to claim that Apple knew this and deliberately defrauded consumers was so ridiculous and incredible that it killed any chance of addressing the real issues.
If these lawyers were bisy and of any merit they would’nt have time to engage in frivilous fishing) lawsuits that require such huge chunks of time
Didn’t Apple replace these boards (and/or computers) after they failed? Didn’t they do some sort of automatic warranty extension?
My 2011 MBP had this problem after about 18 months.
It was well out of warranty, and I was charged $330 by Apple; it was a flat fee to cover whatever was required to put the machine back into GWO.
The logic board was replaced, so it was technically a great price, as that part alone would have been over $600, but I still feel a bit put out.
(It’s worked perfectly since – I am typing this on it right now.)
Something strange – when returned, the bottom cover had a new, large dent on the edge which obviously had happened while it was off the computer. Apple replaced it no charge, but now there is no external serial number on the laptop.
As the Spec Ops guys would say, it’s “sterile”.
This is the weakness of unibody MacBook Pros. I have replaced the whole body of my 2010 17″ MBP, and yes, no SN. Actually it’s written in Sharpy on the inside of the bottom cover.
I have mixed feelings about this. My MBP just had its logic board replaced last month due to the graphics issue. So that’s just over $300 for just under 4 years of use. I’m pretty happy with that.
I think it would be one thing if the logic boards were frying within the 1 year warranty periods and replacements weren’t lasting longer. If this was happening in large numbers, then there might be something to this that warrants Apple doing something to make good on this.
The other thing that made me happy was that Apple serviced my MBP while disregarding all of my own previous work on it. I just sent it into them with the optical drive replaced with a 3rd party hard drive, the original hard drive replaced with a 3rd party SSD, 3rd party RAM and a 3rd party battery.
2 days + $300 = 😃
Apple is not an Ass-Hat company. They can be very nice. These lawyers are the real jerks.