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Apple Faces Lawsuit For Retina MacBook Pro 'Ghosting' Issue
redletterdave writes "Apple is facing a potential class action suit in San Francisco's California Northern District Court after an owner of its MacBook Pro with Retina display accused the computer company on Wednesday of 'tricking' consumers into paying for a poor-quality screen, citing an increasingly common problem that causes images to be burned into the display, also known as 'image persistence' or 'ghosting.' The lawsuit claims only LG-made screens are affected by this problem, but 'none of Apple's advertisements or representations disclose that it produces display screens that exhibit different levels of performance and quality.' Even though only one man filed the lawsuit, it can become a class action suit if others decide to join him in his claim, which might not be an issue: An Apple.com support thread for this particular problem, entitled 'MacBook Pro Retina display burn-in,' currently has more than 7,200 replies and 367,000 views across more than 500 pages."
LG was the manufacturer of the defective screen
They should sue LG instead of Apple
I am no apple fanbois, it's just that if the defective part came from LG, why not home in to the manufacturer, instead of the seller?
Toyota pays up for anything !!
I bought the retina MacBook right after it was released (I'm using it right now) and it's the best computer purchase I've ever made - flame all you want, but I had the money, and it suits my needs.
I definitely have the screen ghosting problem, and noticed it relatively early, specifically when switching to the widget dashboard which has a dark grey background. However it has never, ever interfered with my work or entertainment. I'd call it a mild annoyance at worst.
If this guy wants to sue, then power to him. I suppose he's standing on principle. But I'll pick more serious issues in my life to worry about.
“Oh snap-- Looks like our alternate panel supplier is a bust! Now what?!”
“Let’s submit another lawsuit against the guys who build the good panels!”
“Good idea!”
From what I recall, Apple was replacing at least some of the screens for laptops exhibiting this issue. Assuming that was their standard policy (which, admittedly, may not be a safe assumption), then doesn't the fact that Apple has addressed the issue in a reasonable way right from the start undermine the lawsuit? I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that demonstrable harm of some sort had to have been done. Of course, IANAL, and I can't find evidence that Apple was replacing them for all customers reporting the issue, though there are several anecdotal reports of several Apple Geniuses doing so for customers.
Image burn in and ghosting are NOT the same thing. Ghosting is where images bleed into the next frame. Giving the ilusion of a ghost leaving a fading trail as it moves. Burn in is permanent, ghosting is 1 or several frames.
From TFS I can't tell what they're refering to, because it mixes both terms, and article is TLDR;
You need the all new iDrop!
Old CRTs had burn in because they were steadily being zapped with electricity, how does an LCD have burn in? I can't seem to figure it out. They need a diferent term. Since it is a retina display, how about glacouma?
I have seen Dell LCD's exhibit burn-in (monitors made 7+ years ago). My plasma TV gets a bit of a logo or 4:3 ghost image but it's not permanent and does fade. I guess it's a hysteresis or long time constant decay of some sort. So, is the burning on the Macs persistent or an annoying but temporary issue?
Awww...Apple fanbois and others with too much money and not enought brains -
boo hoo, boo hoo
PLEASE please PLEASE let it be that the Samsung displays are just fine while LG displays are not. I really want to see Apple squirm over this issue.
It's not that I'm "Anti-Apple" here, but just the way we saw that it is clearly wrong for the music publishers to sue their customers, I see it as pretty damned stupid for Apple to sue its suppliers.
Apple sells things which are made of a whole lot of other things. When Apple started suing the supplier of their component things, they are attacking a part which they depend on. It makes me think of a bridge attacking the pillars it sits on. I just want to see incredibly stupid behavior rewarded.
"You're not looking at it right."
- steve
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I have an older LG brand 24 inch monitor, I fell asleep with Dragonball Z paused, and Goku's hair outline burned in...
Now it's just a huge dark smudge in the middle of the screen, and it's relegated to the 'laundry room computer'.
It's my understanding that it's caused by overvoltage applied to force faster response times. That is, if it takes 10 milliseconds to switch a pixel from 0 to 1, you can max out the pixel (black to white transition) in 5 milliseconds by forcing double the normal 1 voltage down the line. allowing them to advertize faster response times (advertized response time is why I bought that model...) at the cost of product wear that won't accumulate until after the normal warranty expires. The brighter pixels literally burn out, not burn in.
Apple does this with more than just screens. I have the MacBook air. The same product purchased by two customers might have two different hard drives under the hood. If the components differ in performance or reliability it makes total sense that customers would be upset. It would be worth it to see Apple take a hit on this issue, since it seems to be a general business practice, and frankly, false advertising.
Apple products are *all* a lottery now.
It has been this way for several years. The only thing unaffected by their use of multiple part sources is the systems without displays (Mac Pro and Mac Mini).
When I bought an iPhone 4S, I returned it four times. The first two units had a horrible yellow tint to the display, the third was blueish, and the forth was slightly green. The fifth unit was blueish as the third, but less so- most people wouldn't notice it so I decided I simply didn't care at the time.
When I bought an iPad 2, there was horrible backlight bleed on the first two units. The third had a yellow tint (yet again), and the forth was once more slightly blue-shifted, but since the backlight had no bleeding or strange artifacts I decided to keep that one too.
Then I bought a Retina MBP... Same thing. Returned the laptop four times. The first four units ALL had LG panels and exhibited the ghosting issue. It wasn't permanent- it faded after time, but that time span was often some multiple of 10 minutes. You could "burn in" that display just by looking at the same thing for 5 minutes, then it'd take many more minutes for the effect to fade away. The only other time I have ever encountered this issue in the history of computing was when I left something on a Viewsonic LCD (a VX924 if I'm not mistaken) for more then 24 hours without a screensaver. That display had some crazy burn-in when I closed the simulator program (from the static UI elements), but it faded away afterwards.
Frankly, I'm tired of this crap.
I used to buy Apple because I'd get a top-spec product that was flawless OOTB. I had no problems paying for a premium because stuff "just worked". Well, that's no longer the case in both situations. Products OOTB are a total lottery, be prepared to return it many many times to get a "pristine" product (I wouldn't care as much if they didn't charge an arm and a leg for this stuff and market it the way they do). OS X no longer "just works", but "kinda works". There's a lot of broken stuff in the core, and even more half-baked and ill-concieved features bolted on top.
So I'll be voting with my wallet from now on. My next laptop will be a Lenovo. My next tower will likely be an HP, Lenovo, or Dell workstation. My next phone will probably still be an iPhone since the iOS app store is a huge chunk of my monthly income, and I'm sure I'll need a Mini to target iOS through Xcode.
Otherwise, fuck Apple.
I'm so sick and tired of their "we are perfect and we offer the best experience out there!" bullshit. This is no longer true and they are going to get fucking wasted in the market unless they get their shit together and start offering the same level of quality and commitment to ALL their products (not just the iOS crap) as they used to before the iPhone. I'm hoping they get hammered in court because they deserve it for these shenanigans. If you're going to sell one MBP with the same SKU as another, it better have the same damned parts or equivalent in performance.
This is particularly obnoxious as Apple began sourcing hardware from suppliers other than Samsung due to their ongoing war on Android. As always, the only ones who suffer as a result of these religious wars are the customers.
I've noticed this burn-in. However, I've noticed something else about it that makes me believe that it is not necessarily the panel itself. I've been playing World of Warcraft in a window, and when I move the window, the ghost moves with it - it maintains it's position relative to the top of the window, not the top of the screen. This would indicate to me that it isn't the display which is ghosting, but something further up the rendering chain.
I followed some of the threads on this on MacRumors. Problem: A lot of the users there will automatically and unquestioningly attack anyone who suggests that an Apple product is imperfect in any way, or pick a random third-party to indict.
My experience has been that, in general, basically all IPS displays are subject to temporary ghosting effects. I have never used an IPS display which did not get some degree of these effects. iPad 3 and 4, with their shiny high-res IPS displays? Ghosting. My NEC monitor from a couple years back? Ghosting. HP IPS display? Ghosting. I've never seen an IPS display that didn't show any of this at all. Certainly, some are more obvious than others -- my NEC display which is a few years old has always had relatively severe ghosting, as does my iPad 3, while my shiny and somewhat newer HP display has less.
But it's always there, and I don't think it's that big a deal.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
As soon as I received my MBPr I started testing to see if it had ghosting issues and if it was an LG screen. Sure enough, both were true. I returned it, and referenced the specific part number 661-7171 (that was the samsung screen) to replace it with. My local apple rep obliged and I had a nice new Samsung screen. Re-ran the stress test and it cleared.
That was 6 months ago, haven't seen a ghosting issue since.
I have two 24" iMacs with burn in issues (now given to my wife and kids). My computer has two 24" Dell displays that are flawless. No more "all in ones" for me.
A retina is a thing for detecting images, not displaying them. Describing your camera or an element of your camera as a retina makes sense. Describing your display as a retina makes no sense.
That the people who thought "retina display" was a good thing sold displays that are less than good does not surprise me. That the people who purchased a "retina display" could tell the difference does.
They should get their displays from Samsung. Oh wait, they can't, they burned that bridge.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Not only that, a frequent argument used by Apple and Apple fans is that the quality of Apple gear is much higher than that of the typical PC. While I will not argue that point when it comes to the Mac Pro and all that -- their case designs are outstanding if not simply sexy -- the variable quality of devices within speaks differently. Fortunately, i have not experienced any of the problems others have with Apple gear beyond the cyclical obsolesence problems where Apple not only renders software obsolete, but their hardware as well.
And that's a problem when the same vendor controls both the software and the hardware isn't it? And isn't this what Microsoft is attempting to do with their secure boot crap?
Apple should bundle XScreensaver.
Or rather, I would think we want that situation to show that Apple's jihad against Samsung is misguided in that they choose against a superior product in order to continue to be pissy.
My iPad2 suffers the same problem. The URL bar will get burned into the screen. Eventually it will fade away, but it's real annoying. I'm not sure it has anything to do with the fact these MacBooks are Retina based. If anything, it's the formulation and process they are using to make the screens.
Life is not for the lazy.
Couple of observations:
- Apple reset the number of views in that thread about 6 months ago. Plenty of discussion about this in the thread itself. So 367k views really only means, '367k views since whenever it was reset'
- The atrocious customer service many of the complainants on the thread received coincided with the arrival and brief stay of John Browett, a British national and former head of Dixons, a particularly terrible UK computer / consumer electronics chain. Browett on arrival at Apple immediately started implementing a number of changes that reduced morale and positively fucked the chain's plummeting reputation for customer service. He sucked so badly, that he was summarily fired at the end of October along with Scott Forstall: http://www.cultofmac.com/198726/why-scott-forstall-and-john-browett-got-fired-from-apple-today/
- Apple quietly took out the LG screen (part number 661-6529) from their supplies of replacement displays sometime in late summer / early fall. The only replacements you can get from Apple now are Samsung parts (661-7171). I confirmed this myself with an Apple authorised 3rd-party supplier as I did not trust Apple to be honest about their supply situation after they fobbed me off initially with a 2nd LG display that developed IR.
- However, their plants in Shanghai are still assembling retinas with the LG screen (see thread for confirmation of this) - why, I don't know; maybe they have supplies to use up.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I manage an Apple Authorized Service Provider. Apple have an Image Persistance Test (it's part of a NetBoot diagnosis tool; can't just post the test online, sorry) - it displays a black and white checkerboard, tells you to look away for five minutes, beeps after the five, and if the pattern is still visible then we replace the display at no cost.
There is no external difference between LG and Samsung parts. Hell, we don't just replace the LCD; the entire display clamshell is replaced. This has been common with Apple for years, not just with displays but also parts like SSDs and hard disks.
If this person is really having ghosting problems, maybe he should visit a service provider or Genius Bar before launching a lawsuit.
PLEASE please PLEASE let it be that the Samsung displays are just fine while LG displays are not.
Yes
It seems that current Macbooks which shipped with Samsung displays are unaffected.
As someone who has owned both Samsung and LG retina Macbooks - I can confirm they both have the problem.
My current is a Samsung, and suffers from the problem. It's rarely noticeable at all, but I am not please with Apples response.
(Though they did let me go through about 4 of these computers before I finally just decided to wait and see if the problem would be fixed - this is a $3700 laptop
BTW.)
Class action suits over consumer electronics are basically a scam that benefits nobody but lawyers. The lawyer offers a lowball settlement that is cheaper than the cost of going to court even if the company wins, so the company invariably settles. The consumer participants of the suit get a pittance that is not even worth the value of the time they spent filling out the paperwork. And the lawyer gets a little piece of each of those tiny settlements, which adds up to a nice payday for hardly any work.
=)
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Not so - read about Strict Liability. Depending on the details, the injured party can sue the component manufacturer (LG), the product manufacturer (Apple), the distributor/importer, and of course the iStore.
i have not experienced any of the problems others have with Apple gear beyond the cyclical obsolesence problems where Apple not only renders software obsolete, but their hardware as well.
I have not experienced this "cyclical obsolesence" of Apple products. I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro r3.1 (Santa Rosa). It was released in the summer of 2007, and shortly thereafter is when I bought it. So in a few months my laptop will be 6 years old. Currently I have 10.6 (Snow Leopard) installed. I can install both Lion and Mountain Lion, the next 2 Mac OSes, to replace 10.6 but I don't want to. Actually because Apple is starting to act similar to MS, requiring Mountain Lion to be installed by downloading it from the app store and not providing it on disc, I may never buy another Apple product. I may by another Mac laptop but I don't think so.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Would people waste their time and get their panties in a twist over a gadget that doesn't live up to their snobby expectations.
Actually because Apple is starting to act similar to MS, requiring Mountain Lion to be installed by downloading it from the app store and not providing it on disc, I may never buy another Apple product.
What a stupid fucking reason. I sometimes question what planet some of you are from.
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/71113/where-can-i-get-a-copy-of-mountain-lion-that-i-can-resell-with-my-apple-hardware
It would be worth it to see Apple take a hit on this issue, since it seems to be a general business practice, and frankly, false advertising.
Why? If I promise to deliver a package to you within a week and one customer gets it in two days and you get it on the seventh I still haven't made any false advertising. On the Apple website they promise you a screen of a certain resolution, a disk of a certain size and as long as they deliver as advertised, they've done their part. Like you say it's a fairly standard industrial practice, as far as I know this is the same when you buy from all the big name OEMs. If the differences are such that I'd call it a defect, then I'd of course demand a fixed product but I still wouldn't call that false advertising.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm surprised Samsung hasn't started to choke off the supply with some excuse like "raw material supply problems". Companies seem to be schizophrenic like that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
PLEASE please PLEASE let it be that the Samsung displays are just fine while LG displays are not. I really want to see Apple squirm over this issue.
It's not that I'm "Anti-Apple" here, but just the way we saw that it is clearly wrong for the music publishers to sue their customers, I see it as pretty damned stupid for Apple to sue its suppliers.
Apple sells things which are made of a whole lot of other things. When Apple started suing the supplier of their component things, they are attacking a part which they depend on. It makes me think of a bridge attacking the pillars it sits on. I just want to see incredibly stupid behavior rewarded.
Samsung's panels don't have the image retention problem, no, but they do have different colour characteristics that aren't quite as good as the LG panels. The LG panels are better when they are working properly, but it's clear they have (or had, since they seem to be getting on top of it) a serious yield issue.
Sure, it's "bad business" to sue your supplier, but when your supplier provokes you, it surely has to take some blame for the loss of business (you think Samsung is happy that billions of dollars are flowing to their competitors instead of them? I wonder if that loss of business is offset by the profits from the Galaxy line? Possibly.)
I have been following the thread on the Apple Support Forums for quite a while, there are some infos missing.
a) The thread was reset viewwise at 600.000 views hence the actual number of views is much higher
b) Only LG displays seem to show the issue, also affected by this issue are the 13 inch retina macbook pros and the new iMacs. Apple did not change their behavior regarding their supply chain even after months of knowing they had an issue on their hands.
c) Apple seems to run a checkerboards test which basically tells if the image retention is bad enough that it warrants a display exchange. So if you have a certain amount of burn in your changes are high that you wont get your display replaced as Apple states this is totally normal behavior for an IPS panel. Whether Apple is right in this or not I do not know.
d) Apple still is silent on this issue, they probably simply want to sit this out instead of offering a full recall, given that they seem to still sell lots of machines with LG panels which show ghosting indicates that they do not have to many options due to having burned their bridges with Samsung.
e) The thread does not indicate on how many machines are affected, but given the huge number of posts a lot of them.
Provocation? Really? Samsung merely plays in the mobile phone market and had been in it before Apple.
I have always found it interesting that people are most often prone to blaming the "offender" over the "offended." Where the line is drawn over what is generally considered offensive is invariably determined by the offended and therefore the offender is always at fault. And yet, when you look at all the ridiculous and unreasonable causes for offense, you begin to realize that it's folly to presume the offended is the party in the right.
Apple hadn't lost any business. However, Apple's own reaction has soured much of the public against them. So I cheer Apple's response for that. Apple is and always has been its own market. Exclusive. Their claims of losses is merely the market doing what it does -- changes, shifts and evolves -- all of which requires that things which come before them affect the things which come next. iPhone is not "original" and neither is anything that came before or after.
This is the consequence of buying from Apple. If you're unhappy with your newly purchased Dell you can return it and pick up an Asus, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba or one of the many other alternatives out there. Buy a MacBook and you're stuck. Unless you're willing to ditch the platform your only hope is that the replacement is problem-free. There's always the option of switching to Windows or another platform, but the lure of aluminum and cult of Apple evidently are too strong.
Well, that's a very poor analogy. It isn't a question of when you get the product. Its a question of quality. One of the biggest selling points Apple has going for it is the perceived quality of their hardware. If you spent a significant sum on a new laptop, and found out the cpu you had actually ran at a lower clock speed than advertised, you'd be a little annoyed, right? If it further turned out that some people who bought that same laptop had cpus that ran at the advertised speed, and some did not, then it would seem less like a freak accident, and more like systemic differences in product quality.
Bottom line: If you advertise quality a product line, systemic differences in component quality undermine the advertised claim.
Really? I replaced 13 LG screens with this problem and have since then had 3 Samsung panels (one "exploded" pixel, one LDVS cable frayed, and currently using the third one) and none of the Samsungs have had image retention, even when left on for weeks at a time.
Yes, provocation.
When the original Galaxy came out, there were an awful lot of reviewers who drew the obvious comparison that it looked a little *too* much like the iPhone, in comparison to the other Android handsets released around the same time - it's not like the argument was that it was like the iPhone because it was a smartphone with a touch screen.
It's also not as if Samsung would be unaware of what Apple might do in the face of that action - it's hardly Apple's first dance in the legal quagmire over alleged copying of their designs.
So yes, Samsung are not entirely blameless in that situation. They made an extremely similar-looking-and-feeling iPhone competitor, and they were surprised when they got sued because of it by *Apple*? Please.
Also, the iPhone doesn't have to be "original" to be a valid product that is defendable by a lawsuit - it just has to be distinct in its design. To use a car analogy, the Corvette is hardly "original" - I mean, cars existed before and since, right? But if you made a car that looked just like it (beyond the things like 4 wheels and an engine), in terms of body styling etc then you would get sued. Is the lawsuit invalid because the concept of a car is not new?
And why they all want to get rid of them.
I Just stopped myself from buying one.
I have been saving a while to get one.
I had this issue long ago and do not want to go through it again.
One time your screen saver dont launch in the life of a computer your hosed.
Not in todays age I just am not willing to do that.
"currently has more than 7,200 replies and 367,000 views across more than 500 pages." :)
If you had done your homework, you would have found that the counter on the thread was reset at some point - the actual numbers are WAAAAYYYY higher!
And for the mouth offs, spouting that the problem is not that bad and doesent affect all LG 1 screens - how long have you had you mbpr?? It took 5/6 months for mine to become noticable It has been getting worse by the day, and its so bad now that when I close this window I can read this post from the IR on my desktop! "only noticable on a grey background is cods wallop. For any graphic artist/ photographer this renders the machine useless, and we don't "all use external displays" - ITS A LAPTOP!! Desktop for the office! Laptop in the field you d***f***.
PS. you web design is vomit
Please take appropriate medication.
Not true. At least not anymore, unless CTO configurations are an exception. My new work box was manufactured in Shanghai in February (in week 8 according to this page), and it seems to have Samsung's panel.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
The problem here? Apples design is based on stark simplicity.
If you bought a Lexus and it arrived with a big scratch down the side would you be okay with that? It meets the specs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"We are shameless about stealing good ideas."
- Steve Jobs
If they did copy Apple then they learned from the master.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Come on, moderators, at least be subtle.
"Overrated" is not the same as "I disagree", especially on a base score comment.
You'll be in for a disappointment when you learn that it's not a black and white world then. Because even though it IS an LG screen having the problem, the relationships between companies like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD, Google and Samsung is FAR more complex than simple "Apple hates Samsung" or "Apple hates Google" or "Intel is holding down AMD". When there's very little competition, you'll find a lot of what can best be described as incest. Competitors who purchase subassemblies from each other to sell products that compete on the open market (often the same products, at that). As well, you'll have competitor dependence - Samsung depends on Apple for a lot - namely to keep Very Expensive Fabs open (flash memory, ASICs) - a fab that's not running at full capacity is costing money in depreciation, and when technology nodes and equipment run into the multi-billion dollar investments every couple of years, idling is not an option. Likewise, Apple is dependent on Samsung for components (and is a very large part of Samsung's revenue). Google is dependent on Apple for many things - including ad revenue (iOS data usage is still much higher than Android (between 2 or 3 times), despite Android outselling iOS by 3:1 or more - Android users just don't like using mobile data), anti-trust (the joke that is iAd? Its what allowed Google to purchase AdMob), and a plethora of other things.
The interrelationships between companies is a tightly knit web. Even outright competitors often source and derive revenues from their competitors. Strange bedfellows, indeed.
Build quality for one. You can pay Foxconn to make a piece of crap PC that's poorly assembled and built, or pay Foxconn to build one that meets tight specficiations and is built more solidly. It's just how much you're willing to pay.
Same goes for parts - you can pay more to get better quality parts or skimp and let the manufacturer figure it out. Or for some parts, it really doesn't matter at all - like hard drives (are there significant differences between a Seagate or Western Digital? Other than anecdotes, they're pretty much similar from the spec sheet. Though real life can say differently - I have seen 5400 RPM Samsung drives outclass an equivalent 7200RPM one from WD or Seagate).
Heck, back when the original Xbox was new, someone took apart the 8GB hard drive it contained and found tons of corners that have been cut to make it cheap. When you're buying hard drives by the millions, you can ask for your price and your build quality.
Hell, SSDs are an intersting one as well - if you note, most OEMs use either Toshiba or Samsung SSDs - not top end performers, but well regarded for their data stability and reliability. It means being more conservative in part choices so they're not going for the bleeding edge, but well tested ones that won't fail in a year's time and cause a warranty return. (Apple, like everyone else, hates warranty repairs because it costs money, so designing stuff to last beyond AppleCare warranty periods saves money).
What were they supposed to do? Just let Samsung blatantly copy their shit?