Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
A class action suit has been launched in the California Superior Court alleges that Apple engaged in deceptive advertising, unfair competition and misrepresentation regarding the ability of the displays used in the MacBook and MacBook Pro to display "millions" of colours.
The heart of the case is that the MacBook and MacBook Pro - like other notebooks of similar size - use display panels that use six bits for each of the red, green and blue subpixels, giving a maximum of 262,144 colours rather than over 16 million from eight bits per channel. A further assertion is that the dithering process used by Mac OS X to simulate eight bits per channel gives significantly inferior results to that used by Windows on the same hardware. The colour performance is said to fall short of that required by a professional user of software such as Apple's Aperture photography application.
The claim is based on the idea that Apple's practices would lead "an objectively reasonable purchaser" to assume the computers are capable of displaying millions of colours and are suitable for use by someone who needs accurate colour. This is said to contravene the California Business and Professions Code and the California Legal Remedies Act.
MacBook and MacBook Pro buyers who complained to Apple about display performance either in person or in writing are said to have been fobbed off by the company, being told they were being "too picky" or "imagining" the defects.
"Dissatisfied purchasers have posted their complaints on a discussion forum hosted by Apple though it appears Apple has engaged in substantial editing of the posts on the discussion forum. In fact, the editing by Apple has resulted in the actual purgation of critical posts, which has occurred in numerous occasions."
One message quoted in the filing stated "If I boot into [Windows] XP using Boot Camp, the dithering and banding and noise goes away... there is a possibility that this is some sort of a driver issue, but why wouldn't Apple just step up and fix this instead of dragging this out for all of us that bought the high end machines?"
The suit, filed by Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley, also names as defendants "Does 1 through 50" - individuals or corporations who were either Apple's agents, servants "acting in a common conspiracy" or or who "aided and abetted" that other defendants.
It seeks an injunction stopping Apple and the other defendants from continuing to represent the computers as being capable of displaying millions of colours, plus damages representing the difference between the price paid for the computers and their actual worth, the loss of professional productivity, "other forms of damages", and costs.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
Latest Headlines from IT INDUSTRY
