While Apple has a reputation for being very ‘considerate’ when it comes to helping its customers with defects and problems with their iOS and Mac devices, that is just one side of it. Like all corporate giants, there is a darker side as well.
It appears that Apple may have misjudged the lengths to which one of its faithful MacBook Pro user would go to getting what he deserves, his machine fixed. Well-known blogger Seattle Rex went ahead and publicly outed the details of his lawsuit against Apple. In it, he detailed how Apple sold him a defective MacBook Pro, failed to repair it and how it escalated to court.
MacBook Pro buyer files lawsuit against Apple, wins
The short story is Seattle Rex won the case, the bad news is what he went through to get his $4,000 MacBook Pro repaired. According to Rex, Apple sold him a MacBook Pro with a defective Nvidia 8600M GT GPU around four years ago. When he informed Apple of the issue, the Cupertino based company refused to given him a refund but instead pledged to replace the 8600M GT boards when they failed for up to 4 years from the date of purchase.
When the third year rolled in and it failed, Apple said they wouldn’t repair it. Instead they stuck Seattle Rex with a huge bill of repair knowing very well that NVIDIA would have footed the bill anyways, meaning zero cost to them.
However with Rex finding himself $4,000 short already, he took Apple to small claims court. There, Apple had sent two people from their legal department to defend their side. What we saw was the Apple team state the MacBook Pro wasn’t covered under their warranty since the CPU was overclocked. What’s interesting is that Apple themselves overclocked it and sold the MacBook Pro to Seattle Rex with warranty intact. Nevertheless to Apple’s surprise, Rex was tech savvy. He explained to the judge that overclocked or not, the hardware was the same as the other machines. The judge asked Apple whether this was true and they confirmed it. The case went on this manner with Apple throwing more curve balls and Rex having the judge deem them nonsensical.
As Rex explained, “I’m not trying to insult iPeople, at least not in this article, but during both mediation and the trial, I realized that Apple has a strong expectation that their users not be tech-savvy and, as such, Apple seems used to infantilizing and bamboozling their customers with silly and nonsensical explanations of highly technical matters.”
Seattle Rex ended by stating that after winning the case, there was one question that kept lurking in his mind. Why did Apple go out of their way to not repair his MacBook Pro despite knowing that NVIDIA would be the one to bear the cost in full after announcing that they had produced those defective chips years ago.
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