Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP March 31, 2008 press release verbatim:
Apple deceptively marketed its new 20-inch iMac in a way that grossly inflated the capabilities of its monitor, which is vastly inferior to the previous generation it replaced, according to a federal class action lawsuit filed today by Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP.
According to the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California in San Jose, Apple is deceiving consumers by concealing that the new 20-inch iMac monitors are inferior to the previous generation’s and those of the new 24-inch iMac. In addition, the monitors are incapable of displaying “millions of colors,” despite Apple’s marketing claims.
Apple’s newest iMac — an “all-in-one” desktop computer that combines the monitor into the same case as the CPU — was unveiled in August 2007.
“Apple is duping its customers into thinking they’re buying ‘new and improved’ when in fact they’re getting stuck with ‘new and inferior,'” said Brian Kabateck, Managing Partner of Kabateck Brown Kellner. “Beneath Apple’s ‘good guy’ image is a corporation that takes advantage of its customers. Our goal is to help those customers who were deceived and make sure Apple tells the truth in the future.”
Apple told consumers that both the 20-inch and 24-inch iMacs displayed “millions of colors at all resolutions.” Indeed, the new 24-inch iMacs display 16,777,216 colors on 8-bit, in-plane switching (IPS) screens, as did the previous generation of 20-inch iMacs. But the new 20-inch iMac monitors do not even come close, displaying 98% fewer colors (262,144).
While Apple describes the display of both the 24-inch and 20-inch iMacs as though they were interchangeable, the monitors in each are of radically different technology. The 20-inch iMacs feature 6-bit twisted nematic film (TN) LCD screens, the least expensive of its type.
The 20-inch iMac’s TN screens have a narrower viewing angle, less color depth, less color accuracy and are more susceptible to washout across the screen.
Apple’s Web site tells consumers that “No matter what you like to do on your computer — watch movies, edit photos, play games, even just view a screen saver — it’s going to look stunning on an iMac.”
In fact, the inferior technology of the 20-inch iMac is particularly ill-suited to editing photographs because of the display’s limited color potential and the distorting effect of the color simulation processes.
“Apple is squeezing more profits for itself by using cheap screens and its customers are unwittingly paying the price,” Kabateck said.
Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP is one of the nation’s foremost consumer law firms. Its clients have won more than $750 million against Google, Farmer’s Insurance, Eli Lilly and other major corporations. As a plaintiff’s-only firm, Kabateck Brown Kellner is always on the consumers’ side.
Source: Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP
If Apple advertised something that wasn’t true, it’s a huge problem. It doesn’t matter if you like the company or not.
False advertising is FALSE ADVERTISING.
I’m actually in favour of “Truth In Advertising”.
Silly me.
The iMac sucks! It’s a glossy POS.
The screen *is* bad. We bought one for our parents and I hate sitting off to the left or right of them when trying to teach them something because the whites on the screen shift noticeably toward yellow and the colors wash out. Bleh! Say what you want about CRTs but at least they offer a full 180 degree viewing angle.
Does this mean Jobs’ “insanely great” premium products are destined to become just another line of cheesy, mediocre garbage?
I really wonder if this is true (and I hope it’s not). I was thinking about selling my 17″ Core Duo iMac and upgrading to 20″ Core 2 Duo iMac. But there is no way I would do that now if the color fidelity is really that terrible.
HaHaa! See! Apple is NOT better then my Super Dell!
lol
1rts april joke!
Being sold inferior product with overinflated capabilities is just part of the Apple experience.
Just learn to enjoy getting taken to Brown Town by Apple. Most fanboys do.
Maybe its time the justice department breaks up Apple. Think about it, Apple Hardware might then produce a prosumer Mac that doesn’t run you $3000. We might get updated monitors quicker than once every 5 years. OS X could be available for PC’s.
Mac Pro’s might become affordable. Or like I said above, maybe a $1500 Mac Pro would be available.
I have one of the machines in question and I have to say, in comparison to the early 2006 iMac I was using, the screen is crap. Text is fuzzy, the contrast varies from top to bottom and changes with viewing angle. I finally got it to be tolerable by going into the display calibration and changing the gamma, along with experimenting with the font smoothing until it looked half way decent.
The main issue seems to be vertical viewing angle – unless it’s straight on, things start to look wonky, so I don’t believe I have a defective screen, this is just the way it is.
Oddly enough, the color problem doesn’t bother me.
@Galen from NY
“There is an old saying, “buyer beware.” It use to be the law of the land. The bottom line is that you wouldn’t purchase a car with out test driving it would you?”
So you are saying that if you bought a Ford and they advertised 150HP and you PAID for that upgrade and when you got home you discovered it was only 125HP: you wouldn’t be pissed and want some money back or trade it back in and get the car you bought?
@sosumi
“…and/or attorneys who’d put getting a win for their client over establishing facts and seeing justice.”
Are you an idiot? If the attorneys win the case for their clients it will be because they established facts and deserve justi
If Apple advertised something that was not true, they deserve to lose.
However, what they advertised was true. The 20″ iMac can display millions of different colors. The viewing angle is low but they did not advertise a wide viewing angle. Even if the illusion of millions of colors is produced through electronic trickery, the eye still sees millions of colors. If you see it, it is there.
Let’s face it. We do not just see red, blue and green, the only colors the diodes in the screen are capable of emitting.
Every LCD, CRT or Projection display is an illusion.
No case here. Get a ‘Light Scientist’ to testify.
I’ll care more about this issue when hard drive manufacturers become more truthful about how big their drives really are.
@AI
Again BS sematics. There is nothing wrong with admitting Apple may need to do something to fix this if they advertised in error.
The whole RGB thing is just a weak, weak argument. I don’t get why you people are so ridiculously nuts over this. Much like Apple credited back early iPhone customers, they may actually have to suck it up and fix this if they are found to have misled people.
Again, if they have done something wrong they should make it right. If they haven’t then they won’t have to do anything.
When you are the big fish in the pond, attorney fees are a cost of doing business.
The ‘old’ iMac (non-gloss white case) refurbed costs more than the crappy (Glossy Screen in an RF Trap) new one. I wonder why.
Check the Apple STore and take a look at the refubs.
Until and unless Apple brings back a proper matte display, I won’t be buying any more iMacs for myself or as a gift for anyone else. I bought a Macbook and hate the narrow AOV glossy PeeCee Fanboi Friendly screen.
It’s time to wake up in Cupertino.
I’ve heard of this even before this lawsuit.
I’m glad that I bought the 24 inch iMac. I didn’t like te 20 inch screen the moment I saw it. And these people are right to sue Apple, because the quality is obviously different.
Apple pulled a nasty thing on its customers with 20 inch iMac.
And don’t tell me that if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. The problem here is that Apple lies to the customer. And I tell you this as a long time Apple fan and user.
To quote the source: “Apple told consumers that both the 20-inch and 24-inch iMacs displayed “millions of colors at all resolutions.” Indeed, the new 24-inch iMacs display 16,777,216 colors on 8-bit, in-plane switching (IPS) screens, as did the previous generation of 20-inch iMacs. But the new 20-inch iMac monitors do not even come close, displaying 98% fewer colors (262,144).”
262,144 color is 6 bit color, as opposed to the 8 bit color required for 16,777,216 colors.
Apple has been pulling this blatant LIE for years now. 6 bit color is the ONLY color standard on all MacBooks and MacBook Pros. This was proven in 2006. A class action lawsuit against Apple by imaging professional is in fact under way. The fact that 6 bit color is the standard for all laptops, including PC laptops, does not excuse the LIE. Apple attempt to cover up the LIE by pointing out that they use DITHERING to approximate the MISSING MILLIONS of colors. And to be honest, anyone doing professional color management on laptop LCDs is fooling themselves.
But iMacs and Apple displays have NO EXCUSE for not being full 8 bit color.
Apple, knowing full well that they are LYING, have done absolutely nothing to repair their illegal advertising LIE. Apple will lose both lawsuits. I find this SHAMEFUL.
And yes kids, I am well renowned for supporting Apple on the foundation of facts, bludgeoning every ignorant sadomasochistic troll in my sites. But I am also well known for kicking Apple’s ass when they deserve it. And Apple deserve a good kicking down Main Street for this calamity. What IDIOT at Apple let this happen? Prepare for a good thrashing.
An apology to PC users. Yes, there are a few dopes among Apple fanatics. Case in point:
Ambulance Chasers sez: When you get to be a bigger dog, everyone wants to take you down. It’s simple – if you don’t like the monitor, don’t buy the friggin’ computer!”
You can’t avoid buying “the friggin’ computer” if you’ve been LIED to by the manufacturer. Go ahead. Do your homework and look right now at the specs Apple have posted RIGHT THIS MINUTE up on Apple.com for the offending products. While you’re there go look at the specs for the MacBook and MacBook Pro as well. What do the specs ALL say: “MILLIONS OF COLORS”.
This is blatant deceptive advertising. This is why we have TRUTH IN ADVERTISING LAWS.
How pathetic that I now have to tell everyone interested in an Apple LCD display, separate of built into a Mac, that it is “BUYER BEWARE”. I would NEVER have imagined this calamity could happen at Apple. DISGRACEFUL.
Am I exaggerating my emotion here? Am I shouting a bit too much about the LIES? If you’ve ever done professional color work on a Mac, or ever supported color production professionals on Macs, you’ll know this is no exaggeration. IMHO this is one of Apple’s darkest days. This is something that actually, for once (!) deserves to cause Apple stock to plummet in price. And it will happen. Very sad. The trolls are going to have a field day over this one, and they’ll be right to do so. Pathetic.
@Derek I agree.
I love Apple. Don’t get me wrong. I have converted more people to Apple than most can imagine.
The last person I converted was a novice. I set them up with BootCamp using VMWare because they were freaked about losing “functionality”. I have no problem with this because most just want to use MS Office, and once they are on the Mac side, I get them to try iWork and they pretty much never grace Windows again. But having Windows on the Laptop regardless, is like a pacifier for them.
In this last case, the woman had a problem on the Vista side. Something about Canadian language being set as default but she wanted it changed to US so that her spell checks would change everything to US spelling. She had problems so she called Apple Care (which she had bought). It took 3 hours to settle her Apple Care account because Apple had set it up under the wrong name and they kept telling her she had not purchased it. Regardless that she had the order invoice direct from Apple showing the purchase and she had the charge on her credit card account.
Once Apple Care was settled, the Apple Support person did then correctly inform her they don’t provide support for Windows and that she would have to contact Microsoft. No problem there. Then she asked about moving old content from her Mac Mini to the laptop. Fair enough. The support person had her connect the Mini with a firewire, start in target mode and proceeded to have her migrate the data. Instead of just moving documents/music/photos/movies, he had her move over her old account. So now she has two separate accounts on her new Mac with different logins, applications that don’t work (Tiger->Leopard), all her media and docs in the separate account to her main one, the second account not having admin priviledges, etc.. The second account didn’t have her wireless password in and she couldnt connect to her Time Capsule that I had configured.
She called back Apple and guess what Support told her? REINSTALL Leopard. So she did. Wiped out VMWARE/Vista/Passwords…. so everything needed to be reconfigured and reinstalled.
Needless to say, I managed to talk her out of returning the laptop and spent another 6 hours reinstalling Windows/Office/VMWare and configuring her laptop on both OSes to work with TimeCapsule and get back her mail accounts, bookmarks, transfer over the media/docs.
Not a good indication of where Apple is heading.
So its ok for Apple to lie. It does not matter if people did or did not buy based on 1 million colors or not, APPLE LIED, YES THEY LIED. Apple Fanboys need to get new glasses and see it more clearly. I have and enjoy Apple products but then again I research before I buy. But my 18 month old MBP has had the logic board replaced, Superdrive and both fans in the last 3 months. That is not normal wear and tear thats crappy hardware for a high price.
Apple should have made it clear (monitor joke) that the screens are different. I would just buy the 24inch. It is hard for big companies to not shoot themselves in the foot.
Me? I’m now waiting to see what Apple do with the Mini Mac and my next purchase may – RELUCTANTLY – be one of those, with perhaps a nice matte 24inch monitor from Dell. Until recently I NEVER thought I would be uttering the words ‘purchase’ and ‘Dell’ in the same sentence!!! But times – and companies – change I suppose.
@Twenty Benson- when it was time to decide between new iMac and Mac mini last year (’07) I finally went with mini with beautiful Samsung monitor. The trick was that I didn’t throw out older, 700 MHz iMac but networked new and old Macs together. After Apple upgrades mini processor once or twice, I will add new mini to personal desktop network.
Well, here you can see an example of colours washout on 20″ iMac display. http://www.silvermac.com/2007/imac-colours-washed-out/
Sure happy with mine. The screen doesn’t look messed up to me. Of course, I’m doing more music related stuff with it so maybe I’m just sight challenged
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