14 DAY TRIAL // Apple product users all around the world have always been quite pleased with the standard of quality Apple has always maintained. Most probably that's the main reason why the Apple fan-boys (and the Mac ones in particular) have appeared. But there are problems that shake even the most dedicated Apple users and, unfortunately for the Cupertino based company, these problems seem to appear these days more often than any other time in the past.
Not long ago we've all heard rumors about the MacBooks that got flawed hard drives and today Apple has declared they are looking into this issue affecting their products. Now the time has come for the 20 and 24-inch iMac displays to take the main role in a new saga of faulty Apple branded hardware.
According to a number of users on the Apple discussion board the two display models suffer from a gradient like defect that makes the colors on the bottom look much lighter than the ones on the top part of the desktop. While in the 20-inch model this has been observed to affect the display from top to bottom, in the 24-inch models the problem seems to go from left to right so a possible video card problem can't be taken seriously.
As it seems (according to Scott Konradt, one of the users on the Apple forum) the cause of all these problems might be the TN film-based matrix LCDs that feature much cheaper parts than the IPS matrix based ones that one can find in the Apple Cinema Display line of products.
KRitchie, another poster on the Apple board of discussions, said that "I went to the Apple Store yesterday to look for this issue. I had to wait as every iMac had someone looking at them! I finally got on one, set the desktop to a single color and was able to observe what everyone is talking about. The top of the screen in darker than the bottom. Calibration helps the fading at the bottom but if I moved my head down the bottom would get darker but the top would get even more dark. There is a definite shift in color as you move your head around. This is just a low end screen that Apple has put into this model. I don't think most people will notice this affect but now that it's been pointed out I don't like it."
Therefore you can also test if this whole thing is true by going to the nearest Apple store and having a closer look at the iMacs put on display. If you follow KRitchie's steps you might have the same unpleasant surprise as he did.
Despite the fact that some people have declared they were satisfied with the image quality obtained on such imperfect displays after changing the color profile in the system preferences to the Adobe RGB (1998), a thing is certain: if you want to use your MacBook for anything else than browsing the web and listen to music you should be on your road to the Apple store to change it.
The bad news for you though is that the Apple stores will not recognize your display problems as something that should concern them and will charge you if you want it to be changed with a new and working properly one.
Now the question is: why would Apple, a company with a very high profit in the fourth quarter of 2007, try to avoid resolving their customers' problems? Is this a sign that they don't really care about their clients and choose to turn their heads the other way and leave their customers to deal with such hardware problems as they see fit? If this is the case then I have to say a lot of people around the world will change their opinion about Apple and the brand loyalty indices amongst the Apple users will fall drastically.
I'm not trying to put down Apple here but merely asking myself if the Cupertino employees and management are traversing a state of denial regarding the hardware problems the Apple products have been experiencing in the past two months or so.
If they do, they better jump out of it and get back to the Apple users with suitable solutions and, maybe, an apology instead of another fee to replace a product that has been flawed from start.