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Macbook Owner With Defective GPU Beats Apple In Court
New submitter RockoW writes "A few years ago, Apple sold defective computers of the MacBook Pro line. They had the defective Nvidia 8600M GT GPU. In this case Apple refused to take the computer back and issue me a refund. Instead, they promised to replace the 8600M GT boards when they failed, up to four years from the date of purchase. Three years later, the MacBook Pro failed and they refused to replace it. This guy took them to the court and won by their own means."
Apple promised to replace parts they knew to be defective for up to four years
this seems reasonable for me. It's not like all parts were defective - there was a higher error rate. Normally the computers have a 1 year warrantee, and you can buy a 3 year for $200 I think. Because of the nvidia thing they extended the warrantee from 1 year to 4 for free on the affected part. This is standard for product manufacturing - if there's an indication of a problem, offer longer warantees.
The issue seems to be apple not honoring their promise within the four year window. but this sounds like isolated cases, and could be for any number of reasons (user voids warrantee, the problem turns out to be a different part, etc). Without knowing the deets we can't rule on if it's egregious or not
in general, I've found the genius bar people to be extraordinarily generous in fixing issues, often for free when it was my fault. Once I cracked my iPad LCD and they gave me a replacement refurbished one for free.
not to mention the benefits of talking to genius bar people for support, rather than calling some foolio in india.
I did in warrantied repairs for an Apple authorized service provider for two years. I can't tell you how many of these repairs apple picked up the tab on. I have never seen another computer company take as much responsibility as they have on this issue. The repair to replace the logic board that contained the defective GPU was a $1700 repair from a third-party authorized repair center and I did an average of 2 to 3 a week for 2 years.
Try stacking up those numbers against any other computer companies defective products in what they did to fix them
This is a huge problem for almost every manufacturer.
And Apple is one of the few who gets apologists jumping in to defend them by pointing this out.
That's strange... I had this exact same problem and Apple replaced my motherboard for free when the time came. I wonder why they denied it for him?
Maybe they calculate, based on reasonable predictions of variables such as the likelihood of lawsuits and the corresponding costs of such lawsuits, that they can profit more by offering the warranties (positive marketing) and then not honoring them (reduced after-sale cost) and paying out the (comparatively) few lawsuit judgments. And, sadly for decency and goodness, they were probably right.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
If I knew that video card 123abc had a record of failing I would avoid that video card in any product no matter who it was from. Then again I try to be an informed customer. Not everyone is. As others have stated, people go to the company they bought the item from when it fails.
Apple is a pain in the ass when it come to their stuff breaking. They have their own tools and tests that they run. For example: we have an iMac with bad memory. Memtest shows errors every time. We bring the under warrantee iMac to Apple to replace the memory. The Imac is fired up at teh Apple store. It fails to boot and only beeps. It is the memory beep according to the 4 Apple store people. A few more boot attempts, the iMac boots but has trouble booting from their USB drive. They take the Imac to run their memory tests on the iMac. A few days later they tell us the Imac is repaired. What was done? Nothing. They found nothing wrong. We take the Imac back. It has the same errors as before. Again, memtest shows errors. This time we just replace the memory ourselves. Now there is no issue. If Apple had used memtest they would have seen the errors. They have to use Apple approved tests. There are free tests for memory and other things that can be used. We can prove that the memory has bad sectors. According to Apple, that doesn't matter since their tests says otherwise. I did ask for a printout, screen shot, something of the test. They could not provide that. They also said that we could not run the test ourselves. When the other Imacs showed signs of the same problem (all bought at the same time). We ran memtest, again bad memory. We just replaced it rather then going to Apple. No need for the longer down time and the headache from the Apple repair people.
I'm amazed at how nVidia tried pawning this one on the OEMs, insisting nothing is wrong when thousands of HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Apple Laptops were having GPU blowouts.
The 8800 also gets lots of attention, but the Geforce Go 6150 and 7200 chips delaminate in huge quantities as well. My HP laptop was sent away once on warranty work when the wireless card dropped out (first sign of a failure). It's now dissapeared again and out of warranty. Surprising the lazy-man reflow actually works:
-Remove battery and HDD
-Turn machine on and wrap in blankets
-Allow to cook for a couple hours.
-Replace battery and HDD.