MacBook "millions of colours" suit settled

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 27 March 2008 01:23

IT Industry - Strategy

A 'stealth' out-of-court settlement that ended a lawsuit against Apple has slipped under the radar for several months.

The case was brought in mid-2007 by a pair of photographers who said they were misled by Apple's claim that the MacBook and MacBook Pro were capable of showing millions of colours when the display panel only uses 18 bits of information per pixel, limiting the display to hundreds of thousands of colours.

Such panels are commonly used in notebooks and cheaper desktop displays. Dithering is used to provide the illusion of the remaining shades, and the plaintiffs claimed this was not sufficiently accurate for photo editing.

The terms of the settlement are unknown, according to the Chicago Tribune, which brought the outcome to light.

The reason given for accepting the settlement - which occurred last year - was the difficulty of establishing that there really was a class of people that had relied on Apple's "millions of colours" description when choosing a MacBook or MacBook Pro.