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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?
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!”
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;
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.
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.
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?
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.
It comes with several; however, even though I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Apple user, and have been since 1976, I have also been an embedded designer for over 3 decades. And as such, I think I can safely say that this is a clear case of a vendor (LG) that never should have been approved as an alternate source. Apple has been replacing the panels/machines of anyone who complains. The problem is that the Samsung panels that Apple can use don't have as high of a contrast ratio, and a slightly warmer white-point; so some consumers are unhappy with that, too... Fortunately, it seems like the fear of losing the business to another "glass" supplier (like Sharp), has made LG fix the issue. So, if you buy a rMBP NOW, it likely won't have the issue.
LCDs have lazy pixels. OLEDs, however, have burn-in as well.
That's a BIG 10-4!!! One recent product design I was working on was an industrial motor controller/drive.For the design refresh, I desperately wanted to switch out the venerable 7-seg LED display with a nice graphical OLED display. Had a nice long-life (75 k hrs.) amber monochrome OLED display picked out, was nice and bright, cost was reasonable, display fit in the package, things were looking good...
Unfortunately, these displays typically would be showing a static image for LOOOOONG periods of time. OLEDS had a big time problem with burn-in, and the usual workaround (walk the displayed image slowly around in a small grid of pixels) was simply an attempt to smear the damage over a wider area.
The LCD vendors, however, produced displays that exhibited NO burn-in (but were deemed unsuitable by management, because they weren't nice, lambertian light sources, like LEDs). But I digress...
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.
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?
While the lawsuit may be excessive it is hardly a case of snobby expectations to expect to not receive a faulty product, especially one that is so incredibly expensive.
Only on a thread about an Apple product would people argue that a flaw in something costing 4 times the price of the competition is "not that bad". I want to sell things to these people.
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
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?