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Apple Hit With Class Action Suit Over Lack of Dust Filters In Macbook, iMac (9to5mac.com)
AmiMoJo shares a report from 9to5Mac: Apple is facing a new class action lawsuit claiming that it sells select iMac and MacBook models without needed dust filters. In turn, this causes issues such as display imprecations, slowing performance, and more, the lawsuit alleges. The iMac and MacBook lawsuit is being brought forward by law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, which is a class action litigation firm that has gone after Apple before. Most notably, the firm won the infamous $450 million ebooks pricing case against Apple. Since then, Hagens Berman has levied other suits at Apple, including one regarding the performance throttling of iPhones. Hagens Berman's latest lawsuit reads in part: "iMac and MacBook owners have reported dark smudges and spots on the interior of the screens of their desktop computers as well as excessive slowness and break downs of their computers related to the lack of filter on Apple computers. The computer intakes air to cool its components, but with no filter, dust gets trapped inside. This affects the screen and logic board of the computer, leading to dust stuck behind the screen and gummed up motherboards, causing the computer to run slow and/or overheat."
Hagens Berman says "Apple refuses to remedy the defect," instead forcing affected customers to pay "more than $500 to fix this screen defect, and even more if they wish to replace parts integral to the computer's sped and performance." "We believe Apple owes it to the purchasers of these premium, high-end computers to pay for the widespread defect, and we seek to represent iMac owners to recover their losses in costs to repair this defect, or for their loss of use of their computer."
Hagens Berman says "Apple refuses to remedy the defect," instead forcing affected customers to pay "more than $500 to fix this screen defect, and even more if they wish to replace parts integral to the computer's sped and performance." "We believe Apple owes it to the purchasers of these premium, high-end computers to pay for the widespread defect, and we seek to represent iMac owners to recover their losses in costs to repair this defect, or for their loss of use of their computer."
Get what you pay for.
I don't believe any of the laptops, tablets or even desktops I've ever owned have come with filter systems on the intakes.
And Microsoft somehow became Apple
This isn't news.. this is just recent history.
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/28/apple-macbook-imac-dust-filter-lawsuit/
"...display imprecations"?
Never underestimate the general sliminess of apple and and their hordes of lawyers.
Our users realize that these are consumer products and, like a toaster, if it breaks they should just buy a new one be a good consumer and, stop complaining.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
$1200 a year? You sound like a fucking idiot.
And I bet those particular models are bigger ones.
The better quality the filter is, the larger surface area it needs to have. Even a coarse mesh needs an increased surface compared to a plain opening.
The intake can't be placed on the bottom. That leaves the thin edges, as currently done, or on top around the keyboard.
Or back-off on the heating/clock-speed.
It's OK, Apple will pass the cost on to the consumer (including the legal fees to defend), just like the car companies markup and pass on the cost for all the safety features they are forced by law to install.
Seriously though, this is freaking frivolous. I will not feel vindicated if Apple loses this, just more affirmed that if I start a company that makes a widget, it will end with more lawyers than widget makers before I sell it.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
obviously you havenâ(TM)t been paying attention to iPhone pricing
MacBooks have a hidden feature where they operate a vacuumcleaner.
Mine also overheated during the summer due to all the dust is seemed to have collected over the past 3 years.
Other notebooks due have small grills or proper dustfilters so that the dust at least doesn't get sucked up by them.
No airbags on Macs? Sue, sue, sue. A kitty watching a bird video might bonk its furry head against the screen. Won't somebody think of the kitties?
Thanks for the design help, guys. 'Coz us engineers have no idea how to design computers.
Hey retard faggot, you’re not required to buy a new phone every year.
I remember when 486 CPUs starting including fans on their heat sinks for cooling and thinking what a dumb idea it was. Engineering a component that runs so inefficiently as to need external cooling measures such as a fan should have been addressed years ago. Fans themselves are prone to premature failure because of bearings and of course dirt and dust buildup, not to mention a fan is a motor and therefore a huge energy hog for battery powered devices.
If you win, Apple will design out the problem of dust.. No ports, memory card slots, or ventilation. Everything will throttle to sub GHz speeds, and all wireless connections and battery charging. Sounds great until you see the resulting product also does not have a physical keyboard.
Obviously a complaint from someone with no experience on the matter. I work for a large electronics company. We used to sell equipment with filters for tha fans. Guess what? They plug up faster and cause the equipment to fail sooner than if it was there or not.
Doesn't matter that they were serviceable/replaceable. Doesn't matter we talked about it in the manual. That's just the way it is.
There's a problem here.
If you're old enough to have the money to shell out $1200 for and iPhone and you're discussing doing it "every year", you're probably facing more issues with delayed maturity than you realize.
I have an iPhone 6S Plus. It was the last good phone Apple made. I bought a top end iPhone X and after using it for a month, I decided to give it to my wife because it was a piece of shit. I now have an iPhone 6S Plus.
Is it slower? I suppose. Can't tell when you use it like an adult.
Is the battery in need of replacement... I'm not sure, with Wifi disabled, the phone lasts 24 hours or more of normal use. With Wifi enabled, it lasts about 12-15. It also is not sleeping properly on Wifi which seems associated.
I guess if I was to play the latest games or be obsessed with AI powered photo tools, it could be a problem. But I don't... haven't since I grew up.
I think the average Apple device should last an adult at least 5 years now.
Battery replacements cost considerably less than $1200 and usually aren't needed until at least the third year.
Let's suppose for a moment that Apple includes an air filter in the laptops. Understand that we're not talking about a grill, a grill doesn't do much to stop dust. It would have to be an air filter.
To produce an air filter to block particulates from entering the laptop, the filter would itself gather the particulates. This would require making the filter itself able to be cleaned. For this it would require some form of removable grill. A removable grill will require either screw holes or some sort of novel slide and release mechanism to be machined or molded from similar materials as the laptop body.
The addition of said air filter will be of limited value if the filter can't allow air passage as well as block particulates. This means that there would have to be somewhat considerable surface area, low density, greater size, and/or a high power fan to assist with airflow as well as a corresponding power source to compensate for the additional draw.
To make an effective air filter will add additional cost, weight, etc...
The alternative is to facilitate effective use of compressed air through a directed nozzle.
If there's an airflow path for cooling within the laptop that allows air to pass through in the first place, this is the path dust is following to clog the system. Therefore a high power burst of air in the reverse direction will be suitable to remove or somewhat release the particles and eject what would likely be a suitable amount from the chassis or bury in places of less importance.
I believe if Apple loses this case, they should simply ship users a free can of compressed air with the correct nozzle for maximum effectiveness and future models should make it clear that compressed air is a suggested accessory on the side of the box.
I think the air filter would be a generally unwelcome addition to the system.
I also think that Apple needs to identify a means of suing this law firm for targeted frivolous law suits that don't actually represent the interests of the consumers but instead target companies who they believe they can exploit for large settlements.
If Apple asks me, I will participate in a class action suit against this law firm for intentionally misrepresenting me and driving up the costs of products I depend on through frivolous litigation "on my behalf".
Apple was refusing to replace batteries. Users, including myself, brought in phones that lasted 4 hours max and were told the batteries were "fine." Massive suits against Apple, threatening to expose their internal communications, forced Apple to offer battery replacements to anyone that wanted them, in return for the suits being dropped.
Also the battery shit show happened immediately upon installing iOS 11.0 while all the betas exhibited no such behavior.
Cook thought they could get away with it. They were wrong. Now Apple sales are plummeting because everyone just got new batteries instead of new phones.
Exactly this!!
It was one of apples planned obsolescence tricks that totally failed and came back and bit them in the ass.
Fuck apple.
Yes they can definitely help. You decide the compromise between better filtration, reduced airflow, and increasing the inlet size or ambient environment.
A more effective filter will reduce the amount of dust that gets in, but it will also reduce the amount of air. You can either monitor your temps with an applet, or just pay attention if you hear the fans spin up on high.
My computer is tucked into an opening in my desk, such that the airflow into the case and out of it isn't ideal. If I had thick, low-micron air filters, I'd probably move it out of the little cubbie so it would get better airflow.
If you add filters, it's probably a good idea to set a recurring calendar appointment every six months to quickly clean or replace the filters. Good filters capture dust - which will eventually clog them up if you go six years without cleaning the filters.
Now Apple sales are plummeting
Apple's 3rd quarter revenues were up 17% over a year earlier. Profits were up 40%.
3rd Quarter results
The firm name has a musical something to it... I envision it as a chorus for a catchy song.
Sorry for being offtopic, it's just that I can't get it out of my head.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Apple sales are down, but revenues are up... They make more "expensive" shit.
The screens are sealed, and lighted from the sides. How does dust particles from the back of the screens cause smudges to be visible from the front?
If you really, MUST run MacOS, you can run it on top of VMWare. Sure, it's not technically legal, but notice Apple itself breaks the law all the time themselves. Follow their example.
I suspect all this fiddling with the keyboard to make it ultra-thin, ultra-low movement is all about smoothing the transition to a fully haptic keyboard. This would allow Ives to make the MacBook slightly thinner again, and possibly it could be a second screen (Apple recently filed a patent for this concept).
I don't know what the point of this would be, but I guess they need to keep 'innovating'. In my view, anyone who just wants to consume media is already using a tablet, and now that Apple has accepted stylus input as not an affront to Jobs' legacy, that opens up tablets for many more low-intensity data creation scenarios. The remaining customers who need to enter large amounts of text ultimately want a machine that does that well. And critical to that is having a decent keyboard. So why you would want to compromise what was once an decent keyboard any further on a machine that is only really required by people who have a lot of text to enter is beyond me.
We need another Steve. Tim Cook seems rudderless product wise, and business wise seems to be trying to turn Apple into an LVMH brand. Ives seems to just be on 'thinner and remove ports' autopilot and it is getting ridiculous. I get that a portless-buttonless flat piece of glass might have some kind of intellectual purity, but that doesn't make it a nice product to use. There are plenty of beautiful post-modern architectural masterpieces that I would not like to live inside.
LOL. From the summary.
Frakkin' Cylons!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
First, the screen is a separate, sealed unit. There should be (and AFAIK is) no open connection between the air ducts and the screen.
Second, WTF do you want a filter? The air ducts suck in air, blow it over a heat exchanger and back out again. Who cares if there's dust in the air? It will generally just blow right back out.
A filter is just going to clog up and cause the machine to overheat. And joe-average user will never clean the damned thing.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Hey retard faggot, you’re not required to buy a new phone every year.
Hey you, your stupid is showing.
In turn, this causes issues such as display imprecations, slowing performance, and more, the lawsuit alleges.
The screen curses you? Awesome!
I have opened many desktop and laptop computers. I have never seen any kind of dust filter in any of them. Granted these were older laptops since many new laptops are nearly impossible to open. But its not just Apple machines. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, etc. None of them ever had a dust filter that I have seen. And a lot of the older machines also had a ton of dust.
I just pulled a tissue from my box of generic tissues and found it was made up of three layers. Carefully peeling off one layer and trying to breathe through it, I was surprised it didn't restrict airflow as much as I expected. Paper tissues were originally made to be filters in chemical weapons masks, so that just might work. I wonder if it would break down over time and become particles that get sucked into the case.
Manufacturers typically use a thin sheet of open cell foam. I don't have any specific brand. I'm sure Amazon sells them cheap.
Another thought about filtration - it depends on the particle size you're trying to filter out. A piece of window screen will block pet hair. To filter out cigarette smoke requires a filter with far smaller holes, because smoke has very small particles.
Apple devices are designed to go "vintage"
I just helped my elderly brother with his older core 2 duo iMac. Can't run chrome at all and Safari won't bring up many sites because it only supports TLS1.0. The OS cannot be upgraded past 10.6.3. Firefox seems to work barely, but this computer is essentially unusable for basic home computer tasks.
All because Apple won't allow a newer OS to be installed. You could run Linux on a computer 25 years old.The latest Windows 10 runs OK on core 2 duo era computers.
As a former fanboy, I have piles of Apple products that are prematurely made useless by corporate choice.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Maybe they can fix the GPU overheating and physically separating from its circuit boards? Customers shouldn't have to choose between replacing the entire computer and baking their graphics card at 200 degrees C for 8 min.
Ugh.
And this 500 dollar "repair" is a little silly. On an iMac, you simply attach suction cups to the glass, and pop the glass off. Give the glass a nice cleaning (I like Everclear or 91 percent Isopropal, and pop it back into place. I never thought about it, because it is just the sort of thing you do for someone as a freebee.
For the bored: http://bored-bored.com/pc-whic... No imacs though.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I can already see the class action suit when performance of the machine has to be slowed to prevent overheating as the air filter clogs and consumers fail to understand they need to frequently clean their air filters in order to maintain performance. Just imagine how mad people will become when their computer suddenly has a blue screen of death as it must shut down in order to protect the CPU because airflow has ceased due to clogged filter.
The high $$$ PC class machines, like toughbooks and industrial systems, are engineered to be highly resistant to dust infiltration.
I don't think longevity is a design goal for consumer status symbols, though. :)
I love Imprecation, but that's probably not what you mean.
Oh well. Bummer.
Alternative Right.
I just want my Mac to be as good as my Thinkpad.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Apple EOL'ed the 6S+ about 8 months after they shipped the last new one. They didn't get iOS 8.whatever that had the slowdown baked in.
You're an idiot.
EVERY iPhone back to the 5s can receive every iOS version up to and including the most recent version of iOS 12.
How about oil filters?
If the 2015 MacBook had oil filters, it wouldn't have gotten into my screen.
Yeah, I'm not making this up. It was on the floor of my trunk while I was packing, and the oil jug I put in the trunk before a road trip fell over, and turned out to have a hole.
It's *really* weird to have 5W20 synthetic slowly oozing out of your screen . . .
hawk
What I'm getting from this is that people are finally getting fed up with Apple.
Apple charges a completely ridiculous amount of money for purportedly best of breed hardware. And yet, especially lately, people are running into one systemic problem after another, and the only way to get them fixed is to fling class action lawsuits at Apple.
Their last several generations of laptops have had the absolute worst keyboard made in recent history.
Laptops that cost $3+k but are unrepairable and unupgradable. They are pointlessly thin which causes them to have to make concessions in their designs that a normal manufacturer would never need to make. This ends up limiting performance, and reducing reliability and longevity. But that's again to Apple's benefit because now they get to soak you a second time with exorbitant repair bills.
The most recent versions of OSX have been the least stable I've ever used. I haven't even upgraded to Mojave yet because 10.13 has caused me so many problems that I'm afraid of how much more damage 10.14 is going to cause.
I have enough disposable income that I have no problem dropping a higher than avg amount of cash for a top notch product. But I damn well demand exactly that: a top notch product. Apple used to be my computer mfg of choice because they were overwhelmingly superior to the competition. But starting around 2010, when they started gluing their batteries into the machines, was when they jumped off the cliff and have been falling since.
While the recent update to the mac mini is encouraging, I am treating that a a blip rather than a concerted effort within Apple to crowbar their heads out of their asses. And now the sharks are starting to circle, and I for one am happy to see them do it. Apple desperately needs a big dose of humility.
IMO Apple wouldn't be doing nearly as well right now if, despite how badly they've been screwing up, Microsoft wasn't also screwing up but 10x worse with their management of Windows 10. And I think Apple is fully aware of this.
Throttling for everyone!!!!
A few years ago, I was working as an IT-supporter at a school.
I was taking a look at a teacher's Macbook, and it seemed to be having periods of freezing, which turned out to be from interruptions to the SATA connection to the HDD.
I then noticed it was happening particularly when it was moved or handled.
So I opened it up, and there was a sand particle stuck between the SATA cable and some inner metal part.
There were multiple sand particles in the Macbook, but that one had managed to break one of the connections in the SATA cable, as the bottom was pressing directly against that cable.
From what I could tell, there was ZERO protection against such particles entering it from the rear, much less any protection from accidental water droplets.
As I had no replacement cables (and no budget to buy any), I gave the teacher his Macbook back, and a link to Amazon where he could buy one for cheap, and later I heard that he had succesfully replaced it.
Back then, I felt pretty disgusted with how badly that Macbook was designed, and this class action lawsuit comes as absolutely no surprise to me.