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Thousands of Apple Macbook owners are campaigning for action over reported issues with the laptop's retina screen. They are reporting "horrific stains" spreading across screens, in the forms of spots and patches.
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A website called "Staingate" has been set up by a group unhappy with Apple's response.Some of them say they have been told they will have to pay $800 (£519) for repair work, the Staingate website states.
A Facebook group formed by people experiencing problems with their Macbook screens has 1,752 members, and Staingate claims to have been contacted by more than 2,500 people so far. US legal firm Whitfield Bryson & Mason has contacted the Facebook group offering to investigate.
Its 2013 models seem to be worst affected, but there are online forums discussing the problem dating back to 2009.
People do pay a premium for Apple hardware, perceiving them as higher-end. Take a look at the images of screen damage—is their anger justified?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedBear on Monday July 13 2015, @02:18AM
I can totally understand the feeling, but I have noticed that if one were to lifetime-boycott every brand of electronics maker that screws over customers or produces a very bad product, one will soon be boycotting every known brand. Pick any five-star rated product on Amazon and filter for one-star reviews. Doesn't matter what product it is, or what brand. You'll find plenty of horror stories of repeated device failure and horrible service within those one-star reviews.
Apple's behavior toward customers with repeated major hardware issues is always disturbing (and embarrassing if one happens to like Apple's products) but they are hardly the only company to behave this way. The real problem that allows all companies to behave so badly toward customers is a lack of effective consumer protection laws. Problems like this that any jury of reasonable people would agree are obviously caused by some manufacturing defect should be required to be repaired or replaced in a reasonable amount of time for no cost during the reasonable lifetime of the device. There should be no limit on how many times it is replaced if the replacements are also faulty (lots of companies pull that BS, replacing a faulty product with the same faulty product that just fails again). If it were easier to get relief under the law then we could get not just Apple but every other manufacturer to start behaving as if the customer and quality control really mattered. If you can't manufacture something with sufficient quality that you can afford to give out free replacements for failures, don't manufacture it. Simple concept.
Apple still has statistically equal or better quality than anybody you might compare them to. This does not absolve them of bad behavior, it's just a statement of fact to put things into context. I think lifetime boycotts should be reserved for particularly worthless companies that universally produce nothing but crap products with extremely high failure rates. Like Belkin.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 13 2015, @04:27AM
My most-serious gripe with Apple is that they have always screwed their developers, and in recent years they are not serving the interest of the general public.
I just got a new consulting gig, I'll be working on Linux. While I will have to buy a notebook computer, I understand I can get what I need for $250.00.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday July 13 2015, @08:59AM
I just got a new consulting gig, I'll be working on Linux. While I will have to buy a notebook computer, I understand I can get what I need for $250.00.
If you're working as a developer, the productivity gains from a laptop with a nice screen, a fast SSD, a decent i7, and a load of RAM make it worth spending money on a decent machine. Once you're in that price range, there's not a huge difference between Apple and the competition. If you're only spending $250 on a machine for work, then you and your employer must not value your time very highly.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @10:05AM
Depends quite alot how you work... a lot of serious work can be done on the oldest machine you can get your hands on.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:49AM
I agree. Just imagine what Kevin Mitnick could do with a 300 baud modem! (You get the gist of what I'm saying.)
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 13 2015, @11:32AM
Yet looking at it from a different perspective, in an industry with a "newness fetish" its incredibly politically incorrect to point out that the world of 2015 is not much different from the world of 2010, so a top of the line for 2010 laptop is going to be immeasurably different in productivity in 2015. Differences would show up in performance on video editing, minecraft, large DF mines, legacy FPS sequels, or just gaming in general, but outside unusual niches and gaming, nothing on an end user machines has altered productivity since 00 or so.
Also it depends on dev environment. My machines are basically emacs/sshfs/ssh terminals and nothing has happened in that environment in the last 10 or so years other than screen resolution, and I guess better font handling in emacs. So I have a '09 era desktop plugged into a really nice monitor at work. The giant multi-machine back end that I'm connecting to in another state for dev and production has, of course, changed considerably since 09. The importance of the local machine would be different if I was running an obese IDE and compiler locally.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:24PM
If you're only spending $250 on a machine for work, then you and your employer must not value your time very highly.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:06AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 13 2015, @05:48PM
I am self employed so I provide my own equipment.
I was quite productive on a mac IIci.
Using a low end box enables one to more readily observe performance problems in one's code. I once got a call at two in the morning from a desperate client whose sun ultrasparc server fell over the very first day he brought it online. I advised him to give his developers slow workstations, to use a load generator and a profiler.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:10AM
I am self employed so I provide my own equipment.
I was self employed for five years and also bought my own machines. They were a tax-deductable expense in this case and my rates reflected the fact that I was not wasting inordinate amounts of time waiting for things to compile - my clients were very happy to pay them. It only takes a couple of days of work to pay for a high-end machine that will happily last 3 years before being replaced by something much faster and relegated to being the spare.
advised him to give his developers slow workstations, to use a load generator and a profiler.
This is terrible advice. If devs are performance testing server code on their workstations, they're doing things badly wrong. They should have a test server that's set up in as close to the real configuration as possible, which runs a set of performance regression tests on each build. And they should have as fast machines as possible, so that they can push out test builds quickly and not wait for a load of changes to be finished before they realise that one in the middle caused a performance regression.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:16AM
... one year later.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 13 2015, @06:12AM
I have my own mental filter for reviews. I mean, everyone knows that there are people who rave a product because there's soemthing in it for them. I've sometimes felt that rants against a product are made for similar reasons. Then, there are fanboys and haters who get nothing more than a feeling of satisfaction out of reviewing things they've never seen or owned. Depending on the review, I either dismiss it, or I might decide against a purchase, but each of those reviews has to pass through those mental filters.