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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."
This is a huge problem for almost every manufacturer. Take a look at the HP DV series of laptops for example. Why are we picking on Apple and not the GPU manufacturers here?
hey!
If Apple promised to replace parts they knew to be defective for up to four years then they'd better step up. The court costs far outweighed the costs of replacing the GPU in his MacBook (and probably 100's of others). The cost of the bad press? It seems Apple has always been willing to test the patience of their customers' loyalties.
I remember that slogan. Not too long ago even. Before that it was "Think different" and buy the most common mp3 player on the planet. I dislike apple because I dislike marketing, and Apple is like an avatar of marketing; the essence of style over substance given form.
Apple got slammed in court for one simple reason: they guaranteed replacement for 4 years. 3 years in, they reneged on their promise. Simple, blatant double talk.
The customer had the documentation to prove his case, and he won.
Yep, page is already down.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
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
As anecdotal examples go...
My MBPro was affected by the problem. I knew about it, and a little over 3 years after purchase (extended warranty had expired) the telltale symptoms started appearing (horizontal stripes on the screen). I scheduled an appointment, took my machine in to the Apple Store, and Apple replaced the video card, no questions asked. Took about 2 days because they didn't have the part on hand in-store.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Shouldn't there be a "holdingitwrong" tag or something?
http://www.dubjah.org/ShameOnApple
Damn Slashdot effect! What do you mean, 404?!?!?!?!?!?!
they arent terrible, i guess... they replace 6 year old products..
they just replaced my 2005 1gig iPod Nano with a new 6th generation 8gig iPod nano... for free, only took a little over a week.
Apple has determined that, in very rare cases, the battery in the iPod nano (1st generation) may overheat and pose a safety risk. Affected iPod nanos were sold between September 2005 and December 2006...Apple recommends that you stop using your iPod nano (1st gen) and follow the process noted below to order a replacement unit, free of charge
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?
My 2007 MacBook Pro had its motherboard replaced for free out of warrantee because of this issue, and I didn't have to push hard at all. I eventually replaced that model with a mid-2010 MacBook Pro only to find the nVidia chip there fails with great regularity when paired with Lion. After another free post-warantee motherboard swap failed to solve the problem they actually replaced the entire system for free with a newer model. I'll be leery of future nVidia-powered laptops but my experience with Apple support was extremely positive in the long run.
As anecdotal examples go...
My MBPro was affected by the problem. I knew about it, and a little over 3 years after purchase (extended warranty had expired) the telltale symptoms started appearing (horizontal stripes on the screen). I scheduled an appointment, took my machine in to the Apple Store, and Apple replaced the video card, no questions asked. Took about 2 days because they didn't have the part on hand in-store.
I had two of them, identical units with the same Nvidia GPU. One never exhibited the problem and works beautifully to this day. The other had its logic board replaced within three days by an authorized Apple shop.
I have no idea why Apple decided to be a dick about this guy's computer; goodness knows they've replaced thousands of others.
Same thing happened to me. My Macbook Pro motherboard fried about 4 yrs out. Apple replaced the motherboard for free; no questions asked. The bill was $1,200 b/f Apple waived it.
They also replaced my iPhone screen when 1 pixel went bad for free...no questions asked...2 months after my 1 yr warranty had expired.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
It's an iGPU - not just a regular GPU. It's welded to a lot of other things. All of those things have to be replaced.
posting as AC because i don't want any attention from HR:
I work as an apple genius at the genius bar.
If the Macbook Pro doesn't but up at all it's not the nvidia defect.
If the GPU fails the device will still boot, capslock leds are going to light and the genius is supposed to run a software check from a external hdd, where the result is written in a text file.
There you can check if the macbook is eligible for repair.
The judge and everyone else wondered "why, Apple, if it cost you nothing to accept the repair, did you have to pay two employees to take time off work in order to defend an indefensible case?" The answer, which they couldn't state, is that most people accept what they are told by Apple as the truth... and most people STILL DO. That once-in-a-while a customer with a valid complaint actually brought them to court and won does not break their winning business model. Most people will take it up the butt when it comes from Apple... and they will do it happily.
The terms of the class action suit were not favorable for the consumers, as your link states. For replacements from HP, everyone got the same Compaq budget 15" notebook, which retailed at around $270 at the time that the notebook owners received their replacements. Many of the consumers, including myself, had purchased notebooks which cost well over $1000. It is argued by some, that since prices have lowered since the initial purchase, the replacement notebook was comparable to the one initially purchased. This was untrue in my case. It also doesn't take into account that many of these notebooks were unusable during the years it took for a class action lawsuit to take place, and replacement notebooks awarded.
In my case, it is basically as if I purchased two $1200 notebooks, and didn't have them shipped to me until 3 years later. By the time I got them, I found out they weren't even the correct specs. Since it was 3 years later, I could have gotten much more for $1200.
The suit pitted the consumers against nvidia themselves, bypassing the computer manufacturers. I don't think this was an appropriate action. The manufacturers share some blame. They took the payoffs from nvidia to replace the GPUs under warranty, until the warranties ran out and it was all swept under the rug. At the time, the manufacturers knew the replacement parts were a time-bomb waiting to fail. They didn't care, because nvidia was funding them to do the repairs anyway. So, the manufacturers were making money by *not* replacing the GPU with a non-defective GPU.
In the case of HP, they lied about replacing the GPU with another defective GPU, and slapped a 90 day warranty on the service work. When I complained to them, and the BBB, they lied and said they replaced it with a different model GPU. My own eyes and lspci spoke a different story.
First, I'm glad he won. It shouldn't have gotten to that point, but he did what he had to do.
I am typing on one of the affected machines now. The 8600M GT in this one failed in January of this year, 4 yrs & 4 months after purchase. Apple refused to replace it under warranty because it was beyond 4 years. I was not happy about that.
Contrary to some previous posts, repair cost for these machines isn't $1000+. In store repair quote was around $450. However, Apple also offers "depot service", flat rate repair on this machine is $310. I couldn't afford that at the time, but in March, I had the money and took it in for repair. It came back less than a week later, repaired, NO CHARGE. No explanation of why it was free, but it was free.
So, Apple certainly could have handled it better up front, but in the end, they did take care of me. I was without the use of my machine for about 10 weeks because I didn't have money to authorize the repair. Granted, it still has a GPU that can fail at any time, and make the machine useless. But the reality is that I have a 4.5 yr old machine that is still working, still very usable, and is likely to continue for a few more years. I say I got my money's worth, even with the GPU defect.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Three of us at the company got 17" MBPs at the same time. Sequential serial numbers even. Every one of them had the graphics card suddenly fail. Mine lasted longest but I believe that is because I took more care to keep my laptop cool.
To my surprise, Apple covered the repair as a "known issue" even though the machine was long out of warranty and I did not have an AppleCare policy. Not only that, the part was overnighted to the shop and it was done in under 24 hrs.
I have no reason to be anything but impressed by Apple's handing of the situation. Saved my bacon... at the time I had no backup machine to do my work on.
So I am left with the impression that the matter at hand was a situation that somehow fell through the cracks.
You remember the faulty PSU unit in iMac G5 some years ago? Well, my gf had one these fashion computer. About a week before the issued the recall compain on G5, her PSU broke. While breaking, it also damage the motherboard. When I brought her computer to Apple Store, they kindly accepted to replace for free the PSU, but asked over 1000$ for the MB. I paid the 1000$ and bring Apple to small claim court. I won my case in 2007, they had to refund the full 1000$ + interest and to pay me 750$ for damage.
Last year I had my 15" Macbook Pro fail, about 3 months out of AppleCare. The GPU died, and the computer wouldn't boot. I called and took it to three different authorized Apple repair facilities and was told the same thing: they wouldn't replace it because it wouldn't boot.
Now I read this story, but my dead computer has crossed four years old in the meantime. It's still sitting in my office as I haven't gotten around to doing anything with it.
I felt screwed over at the time, and I feel even more screwed over now. I guess I should have gone to court. Instead, I ponied up for the new model as I had an international trip to make in 4 days and no laptop.
www.clarke.ca
Apple has got away with too many defects for which it does not take responsibility. The worst was the useless replacement program for their 17 inch AV monitors in the 1990s. Others include poorly designed adapters and defective CD drives.
"wouldn't boot" is pretty general... Apple's Repair Extension Programs cover specific models, for a limited additional duration, that are demonstrating specific symptoms which are being caused by a very specific problem.
We get people in from time to time with a computer that has an REP on that model, and they're expecting Apple to cover something else out of warranty. And we get people demanding we "fix" the computer simply because there is an REP on that model even though it's working fine. That's not how REPs work. (we had a school show up with a panel van FULL of emacs that were listed on an REP, we tested ALL of them and repaired TWO)
If it powered on, and chimed (possibly after clearing pram to turn the volume back up) but showed no video, and could be heard to boot up (hdd access) and possibly even get interaction from it (turning volume up and down and hearing the reply) and external video was also dead, THAT should be covered and I would be surprised if they didn't cover it. All AASPs were given a special tool to test the computer and verify the problem also, and this test could be run after the video was out, OR before it was out, and could identify a computer that was beginning to fail, even if the symptoms were very minor or infrequent. If it was demonstrating symptoms, this test should have been run on your computer. Users tend to put off taking computers in for service, so only about 3% of the machines I saw with this problem still had usable video by the time they checked them in.
However, if it failed to turn on, or failed to post at all, no, that's not the issue the REP was for, that's not a video problem, and you were not entitled to coverage by this REP. I also ran into a couple that were having "no video" problems but that didn't fail the special test app, those users had to pay for their repair because it was the same part, but not the same cause.
I won't say that every AASP and Apple Store does the right thing. I'm just sayin' how it's supposed to work, and how I make it work here. If you still think they didn't react correctly, call applecare (even now) and talk with them about it. I've seen them make things right for people outwards of 5 years after purchase, with a discount on a new machine for example.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Yes, Charlie is a known nVidia basher, but he backed up his findings in bumpgate. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1049921/inquirer-confirms-apple-macbook-pros-nvidia-bad-bump-material Google bumpgate and you will find many articles about Nvidia paying OEMs hundreds of millions for their faulty graphics chips.
I asked this on reddit, and got no answer. All this hoopla is based on an anonymous blog. I've googled around and I can't find anyone reporting this story who isn't just pasting details from the blog. No one knows the guys name. No one knows the court docket #, the date the case was heard or even what court heard the case. Do we have any evidence that this incident actually occurred?
Clear, Dark Skies
I don't detect any fear, uncertainty or doubt about the facts of this particular case. Apple had its day in court. The facts seem quite clear.
There is nothing, including the negative reaction of practically everyone other than Apple Kool-Aid (tm) drinkers, that they should not have seen coming.
It's a terrifically interesting and newsworthy story. The only thing missing is Tim Cook's answer to the question, "Why?"
I had the same failure arise with the Nvidia Geforce Go 7900 GS chipset in a Toshiba Satellite P105-S9337 model laptop. The laptop was out of warranty. In this instance, though, the graphics were a separate discrete board. After being fully ignored by Toshiba, I began looking for used, refurbished, or 'pre-owned' replacements. I had also modded the laptop to force the GPU fan to draw power from a nearby USB port, thus forcing it to run continuously in the hope of preventing symptoms. (It didn't, really.) I knew the chipset itself was essentially defective, but it's not a guarantee that every chip will fail, so I was hoping to get lucky. I found an eBay seller, a liquidation business, that was selling a whole batch of allegedly refurbished ones, and for much less than I had seen them previously. I purchased two. One of the two boards was still faulty, and the seller replaced it; the other one wasn't actually what I had ordered: in fact it was a Geforce Go 7900 GTX, a slightly upscale version and with more onboard VRAM. I discovered that it was compatible with my system, though I was concerned about the potential heat generation. I wound up keeping both, installing the replaced 7900 GS and keeping the 7900 GTX as a spare. Thus far the laptop has continued working, but I certainly suffered a substantial net loss over the whole affair, in actual material cost and labor and time. I wish I'd had the opportunity and courage to do what this fellow did, but since I has a system out of warranty it would have been more difficult.
I also had a similar problem with a cherished 21-inch Nokia CRT monitor years ago. Six years after I bought it, it failed. I wanted very much to get it repaired. I discovered that in the meantime Nokia had abandoned the display market, selling its brand name to Viewsonic and the manufacturing to another Finnish company. When I contacted Viewsonic, they told me there were no spare parts for it, and refused to replace it with an equivalent Viewsonic model (which I really didn't want). That Finnish company had apparently stopped making Nokia display parts, and Viewsonic refused to otherwise honor its obligations from acquiring the brand name. I even contacted Nokia and tried to persuade them to pressure Viewsonic, but nothing came of it. I didn't create enough of a public relations fiasco. I finally contacted numerous third-party repair services, but each one also told me nothing could be done as parts were not available.
You might be thinking to yourself, "Dude, it's six years old, what do you expect?" I happen to live in California, and this state has a so-called "lemon law" that attempts to force manufacturers to not... well, sell lemons! It stipulates that any product - not just the automobiles with which it's usually associated - with a manufactured cost over $100 should be repairable for a period of no less than 7 years from the date of manufacture. That means the manufacture is obligated to make available the parts and service materials necessary for repairs for those 7 years, and if not to otherwise make amends for failure to do so.
Obviously Viewsonic had failed to do that. Because of that lemon law I had an open and shut case, had I taken Viewsonic to court here in California. I didn't, but again I wish I had.
My point in sharing these anecdotes is that this is a consistent pattern of behavior with all manufacturers, not just one or two or a handful of them. It's endemic to the system we've allowed to take hold. It's this unfair system that makes consumers the inferior party in transactions with these manufacturers that motivated California's lemon law in the first place. It SHOULD be a Federal law applicable in every state. Better yet a globally recognized law.
Just imagine what he could have achieved with a working GPU...
Really? Because the sheer volume of replacements that would have ensued would have damaged Apple's partner relationship with nvidia. There's your answer.
I'm going to have to disagree. The symptoms included other parts failing due to the excess heat generated by the GPU. The most common preliminary indication of the problem on HP notebooks was the wireless chip failing. The wireless chip was located in close proximity to the GPU. It would get so hot, that the solder would melt. As you stated in your other post, frequent heating and cooling would cause the connections to become faulty. Therefore, one temporary fix was to let the notebook heat up, then place something heavy on the keyboard directly above the wireless card, and keep it there until the notebook cooled back down.
In addition, when I was getting ready to file suit against HP, had a script set up in a cron job to monitor the GPU temperature and record it to a log file including the date and time. I used the nvidia-settings executable with something like:
/usr/bin/nvidia-settings -q '[gpu:0]/GPUCoreTemp' | grep Attribute
The temperature was consistently greater than 100 degrees Celsius, sometimes much higher, and the notebook was not being used for gaming or anything else that would tax the GPU.
Now, unless you are saying that the weak die/packaging material was used elsewhere throughout the board, and the entire notebook should be able to withstand these temperatures, then I cannot agree.
2007 Macbook Pro, identification string "MacBookPro3,1". Four logic board replacements, one borderline.
When I was in college I worked two summers and sold my old Macbook to pay for this beast; I also bought AppleCare. It was an expensive laptop, but it performed admirably; it was basically top of the line in its time. Then things in Half-Life 2 started turning purple randomly. It didn't take much longer until trying to play Team Fortress caused BSoDs once the GPU had a chance to heat up. Then it got worse - I could boot up, but the screen was dead. They ordered me a new logic board, and the champ was back in business. Fast forward about three months, and the game I was playing had random horizontal lines on the screen. New logic board, no problem. Actually, there was a problem - the first replacement didn't finish booting once before the GPU failed; this one could at this point give me a text terminal, but any graphics were right out. Fortunately, the shop was booting it up on their bench to demonstrate their repair, so they had a new board overnighted in the next ten minutes, and the next afternoon I had another new board.
The next time it gave out - three months and a week, like clockwork, I escalated my tech support call. I got a department Apple will deny existing, called something to the effect of "Customer Solutions". These exist above first-line tech support (who are fairly knowledgeable and very useful), and above the engineers that they turn to when first-line efforts fail. They offered me a new laptop, with "like for like" - nothing worse than my old machine, except I lost the ExpressCard|34 slot on the 2009 model they gave me; while I'd like a USB 3.0 port, I must admit the ExpressCard slot mostly held an SD card adapter.
After that, I tried to get them to take the aftermarket hard drive out of my defective machine and put it in the new unit. They wanted to charge me $150 for the privilege of doing the deed without voiding my warranty at the local Apple store, and (remember: college!) I didn't have the money. I was about to leave with a broken computer in the hopes that I could work something out with phone support, but as I was packing my computer to go, the third-line person escalated my case. Again. I gave them the name of the store manager, and they hung up. She disappeared a few moments later after taking a call on her two-way radio. Ten minutes later, she came back looking rather startlingly meek - having started this day long escapade being painfully stubborn about this "nominal" charge that was nothing of the sort in my collegiate financial condition. She also had a laptop box in her hand, and told me she would have my hard drive in my hands more or less "immediately".
My takeaways?
Apple corporate was willing to grab the manager of their flagship store (at the time) by the (metaphorical) balls, shake briefly, and tell her to sit down and shut up or else.
Apple corporate was willing to face this problem head-on, and stands behind their products.
Apple has some bad apples at the local level (and it came out that this apple store was known as the least friendly in town, when I spoke to an Apple employee).
The unibody Macbook Pro is a downright pleasure to work on, once you get past the Loctite Blue.
The 2007 Macbook Pro used Kapton "space tape" to keep some internal parts in place.
AppleCare is worth its weight in gold.
The 2009 model really should be considered to have a user serviceable battery, as it's an easier swap than the hard drive; I just think they didn't want people trying to change their batteries on an airplane, or something similarly stupid.
Carrying around an unprotected MBP battery now is something similarly stupid, as they're almost as fragile as bare cells.
While talking to the Apple rep who specced out my replacement system, it came out that only 15% of users used the ExpressCard slot, and around 90% of them used it for a memory card reader, but I still want USB 3.0 now.
Unlike other laptops, the unibody Macbook Pro has easily cleaned fans.
If Apple does not apologize publicly for the way they treated this guys as well as the other untold number of customers who bought their defective hardware, this is going to simply cost them a lot of money.
I, for one, will not buy another piece of hardware from Apple until they issue a statement. And I'm a customer from wayyy back.
In December 2008 I purchased a Dell XPS M1330 laptop with a Nvidia 8600m GT and experienced the same problem. I learned this year that in response to the failing GPUs, Dell extended my warranty by 1 year. However, Dell failed to convey that message to me directly so by the time I was aware of this malfunction my extended warranty had expired. Now they won't take responsibility for their defective product. What can I do?
Well I am in a similar situation.
My Macbook pro has had this issue twice before. Both times it got fixed while the program was still running. My laptop has just reached the end of that 4 year agreement and it has now just happened a 3rd time.
I rang apple and as a result i now have an unusable laptop that has been affected 3 times by the defective GPU problem, and i have to foot the bill if i decide i want to repair it.
Does Apple pay all these people to astroturf here? Given that they'd send two attorneys to a small claims court, I would imagine so!
When I worked at Apple, I saw with my own eyes employees "astroturfing" forums, sometimes during the Apple Keynotes as they were being simulcast to the lunchroom at Infinite Loop One. (It was funny because it looked like a scene from the 1984 commercial: everyone sitting around watching a giant face on a big screen.)
I had the same issue with my MBP. However, I tried to get it repaired before they even acknowledged the program. I went to the Apple store and they bascially said I abused my computer along with other nonsense. I later showed up with nvidias press release stating that the GPUs were faulty, but Apple still hadn't recognized the problem yet, and gave me a $700 something repair quote. Oh, and it happened to be about a week outside my 1 year warranty. I desperately needed a computer at the time, so I didn't wait around to play games.
Luckily I purchased it with my American Express card, which doubles the warranty. I called a rep and told them the deal (less than 5 minutes on the phone), they overnighted me a box and refunded me the purchase cost the next day. Never buying Apple again.
Funny enough, about 3 weeks later, when I already had my new non-Apple computer, I got a call from the Apple store manager saying they would now repair my MBP and give me $100 off the purchase of a new one if I wanted to go that route.
Of some person with a Macbook, holding a defective GPU in his hands and beating an apple with it.
They replaced the board a full 18 months out of warranty. They could stand to better inform the Geniuses. I did have to escalate my issue to the manager both when I brought it in and picked it up. I also had to show them their own knowledge base article and explain it to them.