Ars Technica:
Last week three men filed a class action lawsuit in Northern California District Court alleging that Apple’s 2011 MacBook Pro laptops were defective and that Apple did not take proper steps to compensate customers whose hardware broke.
The lawsuit specifically addresses 15” and 17” MacBook Pros from 2011, which the plaintiffs claim suffered from “random bouts of graphical distortion, system instability, and system failures.” The plaintiffs also assert that the problem is widespread, with an online survey conducted by the plaintiffs receiving over 3,000 responses from 2011 MacBook Pro owners in a single week.
As someone who has one of these affected machines and has already had one logic board failure attributed to it, I’m going to follow this closely.
I had a G3 iBook with “known” issues years ago, and Apple extended warranties/AppleCare periods, waived repair fees, and in my case just gave me a new G4 iBook after the 3rd logic board replacement. Why they’d let this go as long as they did confounds me? I’m sure someone somewhere has a spreadsheet of how much it would cost to cover the repairs/replacements, but surely that number has just been exceeded, regardless of how the suit ends.
I’ve not followed this closely but been aware of the issue and it strikes me that the amount of bad publicity that Apple is going to get (fanned on by the haters) will be much more expensive than a pre-emptive fix would have been.
I had a 2011 15″ Macbook Pro. The hard drive, battery, and logic board failed. After 1.5 years in, the machine was extremely slow, to the point of being practically unusable. I took it to the Apple store 5-6 times, but they would not acknowledge that there was a problem, because it was difficult to replicate on demand (computer would restart overnight or the screen would go dark and make the computer unresponsive). Only after I got lucky and was able to replicate the problem did they replace it. If I had not bought the extended warranty, I likely would have never bought a Mac again, that’s how upset I was. The apathy on their part, and the unwillingness to acknowledge a problem that I was having constantly, was pretty shitty.
And the only reason they replaced it was because they were going to have to replace the screen, and replace the logic board for the second time.
My 2011 MacBook Pro 17″ has performed flawlessly — not sure what to make of this class action suit.
I’ve had it fail 3 times so far and had to shell out $350+ twice. Once it failed within a couple of days of the logic board being replaced and they had to also change the magsafe board to make it all work. Luckily it was my work machine so I was able to get it reimbursed. But it was inconvenient specially with tight project deadlines.
I have a MacBook Pro 15″ 2011 that is facing exactly the same problem highlighted in this class action lawsuit. I am extremely happy someone has decided to take Apple on this one. Before this issue happened and Apple’s pathetic response I had bought a MacBook Air (which is also dead now), iPod touch 3G and 4, iPad, iMac and iPhone. Now I would not buy another Apple product in my life time unless Apple comes out with a program to address my MacBook Pro issue. Since last 10 months that this issue has cropped up, all my incremental investment is going into Android. At least these devices are stable.