After filing a class action lawsuit against Apple, consumers allege that the company purposefully hid a a MacBook Pro defect from users to avoid fixing it.

Apple’s line of MacBook computers are incredibly expensive; for the price of one Apple MacBook you could buy three average Windows powered laptops. But it’s a price that millions of people the world over are willing to pay as Apple promises and assures the highest quality.

With the 2011 MacBook Pro Apple made one of these very promises, explaining that “The powerful 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro models feature quad-core Core i7 processors up to 2.3 GHz and AMD Radeon HD graphics processors with up to 1GB of video memory for high performance gaming, pro video editing and graphics intensive applications”. Many people bought the 2011 MacBook Pro specifically for this feature, after all, Apple had told them exactly what to expect.

So imagine their disappointment when some time after, these very graphics cards packed up, offering severely diminishing visuals. Rightfully, these consumers were angry and in a class action lawsuit against the company, they allege that Apple knew the graphics cards were faulty and attempted to cover them up.

Following the lawsuit filed against Apple in October 2014, law firm Whitfield, Bryson & Mason LLP has now written:

“Specifically, we allege that between early- and late-2011, Apple released a software update that dramatically reduced the graphical performance of the GPUs in order to prevent them from reaching temperatures that would cause the GPUs to effectively self destruct.”

As far as an allegation goes, that’s pretty damning, especially given how much money Apple could have made from this not just in terms of MacBook sales but in repair fees, with many users having to pay Apple to fix their computers and replace the graphics cards. Some consumers even saying that their replacement graphics cards broke too. Just to prove that Apple did do this, several members of the lawsuit have put their MacBook Pros forward for testing by a computer hardware expert.

While it’s yet unclear just what will happen, we know that Apple is expected to file a motion to dismiss the case on January 29th and that Whitfield, Bryson & Mason LLP will respond with a filing on March 5th. This could a drawn out court case then but we’ll keep you posted once we know more.

Source: AppleInsider

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