“Apple Inc. has been hit with another class-action lawsuit. This time the formal complaint comes courtesy of a pair of MacBook and MacBook Pro owners who charge the company with falsely advertising the quality and capabilities of the displays used in the Intel notebooks,” Prince McLean reports for AppleInsider.
“In the May 3rd filing with the Superior Court of California for the County of San Diego, private citizens Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley are seeking multiple forms of relief and reimbursement, in addition to an injunction that would prevent Apple from continuing to market its existing notebook displays alongside claims that they support ‘millions of colors’ and offer views ‘simply unavailable on other portables,'” McLean reports.
McLean reports, “Specifically, they charge that the Cupertino-based company’s MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook displays are only capable of displaying the ‘illusion of millions of colors through the use of a software technique referred to as ‘dithering,’ which causes nearby pixels on the display to use slightly varying shades of colors that trick the human eye into perceiving the desired color even though it is not truly that color.'”
“Citations in the suit imply that the Apple notebooks may employ sub-par displays only capable of 6 bits per channel (18-bit color), rather than 8 bits per channel, making them capable of displaying only 262,144 colors without dithering, as opposed to millions. That would explain why within weeks of purchase, a flood of customers reported that their MacBook and MacBook Pro displays appeared ‘grainy’ or ‘sparkly,’ according to the complaint,” McLean reports.
More in the full article, including a copy of the complaint (pdf), here.
Has anyone here noticed this “problem”?
This is bad.
It’s not a lawsuit. It’s a clown suit.
San Diego is home for the leading law firm in Class Action filings. They have been and are currently being investigated for several illegal acts in those filings, including paying plaintiffs to claim damages where none existed.
I’d like to see who the law firm is that filed this latest claim.
So who can recognise that their Mac does not have the advertised number of colors? Give me a break.
Nope. I and I use my MacBook Pro for photo editing and graphics all the time. I think Apple’s gotten to the size where it’s going to get sued by some idiot/s for just about anything. Hmm… now that I think about it, maybe I should sue the psychological torment caused by the delay of Leopard.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”tongue wink” style=”border:0;” />
Representatives for the Law Offices of Peter M. Polischuk, attorneys representing the plaintiffs, had not returned inquires for comment as of press time.
“…are seeking multiple forms of relief and reimbursement”
Relief? Reimbursement? May I see some receipts please?
Let’s file a lawsuit against them for stupidity.
God bless fuc… America. Where else can you find such stupidity? … oh yeah the White House.
Um, the Mac is the preferred platform for creative designers – graphics, photography, video. These folks ought to care about color, as should Apple.
What an absolute pile of b******s.
The suit does have a point, however pedantic, if Apple advertises that it uses 8-bit displays yet is only using 6-bit displays.
The question is whether or not the Macbooks can display the entire range of 16.7 million colors or only 262,144. I doubt the human eye can see the difference, and it doesn’t help that the complainants confuse the issue with talk of dithering. The fact is, all color displays use it! They all have colors side by side creating the illusion of full color.
“trick the human eye into perceiving the desired color…”
so you DO actually see the colors. how you get there is not important.
useless lawsuit!
Well, apparenty it is affecting my iMac display, becaue this lawsuit looks like bullsh!t on it…..
I really found this quite funny. Being a Lawyer (not an electronics expert) myself, I am very sure this will be dismissed once it goes before a Federal Judge, if it even makes it that far. I am sure the Corporate lawyers at Apple Inc. find this just as amusing as I do.
@ Gregg Thurman – The Firm backing the plaintiffs is: Law Offices of Peter M. Polischuk
I did a quick search on them using a law database. Seems they are nothing more than a small time firm taking on cases against corporate giants. Too much avail… I can’t even find a website for them. My guess is this, they might have ‘some’ reasonable complaints but it’s not enough for a class action suit, none the less, Apple Inc. can sit in court way longer than these people.
After reading ‘some’ of the PDF this is a frivolous suit for sure.
Lawyers are color blind. They only see shades of green.
“trick the human eye into perceiving the desired color…”
so you DO actually see the colors. how you get there is not important. useless lawsuit!
Yeah, that works well in print environments where it’s CRITICAL to actually see what colors are going to be printed beforehand.
Moron.
Actually, I have noticed this problem. I do a lot of photo retouching on my 17″ Intel MBP that includes making a clipping path and creating fake shadows. It’s all too apparent to even the most untrained eye that the smooth gray gradients of the faked shadows show up as distinct stripes. Even the dithering trick doesn’t offer any help here. The display is clearly not a full 8-bit display. Same thing goes for the iMac. The display is better when the MBP is connected to a 23″ Cinema Display, but the effect is still noticeable.
My MacBook Pro looks better than any Vaio Dell or anything else.
Any Judge or jury would endorse that if they had them in front of them.
Then again judges in the UK are not that up to speed. This one had to have explained to him what a website was:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/18/njudge118.xml
Wasn’t going to comment, but the MDW Magic Word = brown, and that just seems appropriate commentary on this lawsuit.
Your friendly Republicans have been actively seeking to reform tort law to minimize frivolous lawsuits unlike the Democrats (e.g. Al Gore) who never think any lawsuit is without merit.
So, when will you be sued for passing on your stupid genes?
My wife loves her MacBook and I love it when I use it to type notes, surf the web, etc. But I thought it was just me when I noticed the dithering in the menu bar and in other places. Plus, when I open up photos of my family, I can notice the dithering and banding in the flesh tones. I wrote it off as having bad files and not setting the display resolution properly. However, those same files look wonderful on the G5’s display and the iMac’s display. So, I checked the settings of the display on the MacBook and it said “millions of colors.” At that point, I just assumed the display dithers the way it does on the MacBook because of the integrated graphics chip as opposed to a dedicated graphics card. But if what the lawsuit alleges is true, that is pretty messed up for Apple to be passing off 18 bit displays off as 24 bit displays.
I’m assuming Apple uses the same screen manufactures that PC box assemblers use. What do they use?
I would like to hear Apple’s response. This is not a grey area. (no pun intended) The screens are either 6 or 8 bit. Which is it Apple?
What are they currently selling now? What did the PowerBooks use?
I can see the banding just using the color picker. You can call it up using TextEdit. Then choose the “spectrum” picker, and make the color picker palette really big. You can clearly see both horizontal and vertical stripes. And if you do the “display zoom” (hold control and spin your mighty mouse nipple) you can see clearly that the spectrum picker is using dither patterns.
The question is… is the spectrum picker just a poor implementation? Why does it need to dither? OR, is 24 bits actually not enough colour depth to be unnoticeable to the human eye? Or… as the lawsuit claims, maybe Apple’s not using a full 8-bits per channel. If they’re not… the lawsuit will hold no matter how pedantic a few people on this list may think it is. The banding is very obvious to almost anyone, if you just look. And that does strike me as being a problem that Apple will have to fix.