14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is facing yet another class-action lawsuit. The formal complaint has been issued by MacBook and MacBook Pro, owners who charge the company with falsely advertising the quality and capabilities of the displays used in the Intel notebooks.
Filed on the 3rd of May with the Superior Court of California for the County of San Diego, the lawsuit seeks multiple forms of relief and reimbursement as well as an injunction that would prevent Apple from continuing to market its existing notebook displays with claims that they support "millions of colors" and offer views "simply unavailable on other portables."
Citations in the suit imply that the new Apple portables make use of displays only capable of 6 bits per color channel (18-bit color), instead of 8 bits per color channel (24-bit color). If the displays truly only use 6 bits, they are incapable of showing more than 262,144 colors without dithering. Dithering is a technique that causes nearby pixels on the display to use slight variations in shades of colors, tricking the eye into perceiving a certain color even though it is not truly there. If this were the case, it would help explain the many complaints that customers made about their MacBook and MacBook Pro displays being "grainy" or "sparkly," according to the complaint.
The issue is of particular importance to MacBook and MacBook Pro owners that work in the graphics industry and rely on the accuracy of their displays. Such a limitation of the display capabilities would make the machines unreliable for editing purposes.
Besides false advertising and misrepresentation, the Cupertino Company is also being charged with violating the Unfair Competition Law and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act with its failure to address and rectify the situation. The suit claims that because of the large number of customer complaints on Apple's own website, it is clear that Apple is aware of the problems.