Slashdot Mirror
NVIDIA Gets Away With Bait-and-Switch
racquetballguy writes "As part of a December 2010 settlement agreement, NVIDIA agreed to provide all owners of laptops containing a defective NVIDIA GPU with a laptop of similar kind and value. In February, NVIDIA announced that a $279 single-core Compaq CQ56 would be provided as a replacement to all laptops — from $2500 dual-core tablet PCs to $2000 17" entertainment notebooks. Ted Frank, from the Center for Class Action Fairness, filed an objection to the court, which was overruled by Judge Ware today. Once again, the consumers of a class action lawsuit lose."
Except 99% of people in the class aren't going to sue anyway, so they gain nothing by opting out. I just got $16 from a Comcast Bitorrent blocking class-action lawsuit, which is more than I would have gotten otherwise.
A class action is NEVER about making he victims whole. It's about punishing the offending corporation. Period.
If you ever go into a class action thinking you're going to gain something personally, you're an idiot. (Unless, of course, you're a lawyer.)
Since this is slashdot, I'll try to make a poor analogy. It's like the geeks and nerds at a school hiring a freelance bully to take care of their local bully. The nerds and geeks shouldn't expect to get anything out of it except a cessation of hostile activity from their local bully. The freelancer gets to keep the bulk of whatever he manages to recover from the local bully. He may get the bully to agree to give a candy bar to every kid in the school but the geeks and nerds aren't going to recover multiple years' worth of lunch money. The goal is to prevent future bad behavior on the part of the local bully and nothing more.
Not true. These people were without a laptop for 3 years. At the time the laptop died, it was worth $2000 and these people told nvidia: fix this mess you created. Nvidia declined and a suit was filed which took 3 years. It's not the customers fault it took so long to get justice. The day the damage was claimed against nvidia was the day the value of the item in question is determined.
If you have to sue your insurance company about your car for 3 years, the company can't continue to depreciate the amount it owes you over that time if they're found guilty..
So some 3 year old HP laptops that cost a lot back then are being replaced by $350 HP laptops now. Normally a 3 year laptop can't even be sold for $350 (unless it's a top of the line Apple model - and these aren't). And what about the specs? Nowhere in TFA is a comparison of the specs of the system being offered with the specs of the original systems...
Where exactly is the bait? Or the switch? I guess the article was submitted by one of people who expected his 3 year old system with something that costs the same now, so he could have a substantial improvement in performance.
The TX1000 series which is a large portion of this suit is a convertible tablet PC. I own one of these, it was a dual-core 1.9GHz Proc, 3GB RAM, 12.1"(which is VERY portable), and had a screen that could be turned over and closed to provide a tablet. You cannot touch one of these for anywhere near the price of that Compaq being offered, nor does this "comparable" computer listed offer ANY of the features this notebook did. An iPad would be a closer fit to a Tx1000 series notebook, and even that is less of a machine and twice the cost of the Compaq.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.