Apple legal clears its desk
Are Apple’s lawyers getting ready to go on vacation? For the second time in as many days, the company has agreed to settle a lingering class action suit.
On Thursday, it was a pair of complaints out of Canada that 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation iPods were delivering something like three hours of music, not eight hours as advertised. Although one case was granted class action status and the other wasn’t, Apple (AAPL) agreed to settle both, according to the Montreal Gazette, offering $44 store credit to any Canadian who purchased one of the affected iPods before June 24, 2004. As many as 80,000 could be eligible. Hearings are set for May 26 in Montreal and June 20 in Toronto.
Then on Friday, according to the LA Times, Apple agreed to pay some 2.3 million Mac owners refunds of $25 to $79 to resolve claims that some of its power supplies were prone to fray and spark and self-destruct. Customers who bought replacement adaptors for PowerBooks and iBooks could be eligible for the refunds, according to documents filed in federal court in San Jose. A final court hearing is scheduled for Sept. 8.
Still pending, notes the Gazette, is the case filed against Apple Canada last fall by law student David Bitton who was surprised to discover that his 8GB iPod Nano held only 7.45GB. According to his lawyer, Bitton is asking for the full $220 purchase price, but will settle for 7.5%, plus court costs.
Not only does the above noted law student have no engineering background, but he also does not know how to read the fine print (this seems pretty ironic when considering his chosen profession). Quoted from the Apple Store, a standard disclaimer.
“(1) 1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less.”
Apple has been making that sort of claim about their hard drives for years.
Obviously this law student has no engineering background. Normally I do not endorse Wikipedia, but in this case they have a very good explanation of the confusion. Looking up “gigabyte” one finds there are 2 definitions, one being 10E9 or 1,000,000,000 bytes and the other being 2E30 or 1,073,741,824 (”E” stands for exponent, i.e., raised to that power). Since computers are binary machines they “see” 2E30 as being 1 GB thus if a hard drive were advertised as 500 GB according to the 10E9 byte definition, the computer would read its capacity as 465 GB. Flash memory manufacturers (the iPod Nano uses flash) also use the 10E9 definition of a GB. Thus I see little merit in this suit.
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
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