Apple Computer customers in Mexico and the United Kingdom have joined the legal crusade to make the Silicon Valley company pay for allegedly defective screens on new iPod nano music players.
A class-action lawsuit on behalf of all iPod nano buyers in Mexico and the United Kingdom was filed in the US District Court for Northern California on November 4. The suit mirrored one filed against Apple on behalf of US nano buyers last month.
The maker of the world’s top selling portable MP3 players ignored flawed screen design in its hurry to get nanos to market, lead attorney Steve Berman charged in the lawsuits. The volume of international requests to be included in the US suit against Apple prompted the second filing, according to Berman.
My dog’s chew toys get fewer scratches than using my nano for three hours in my pocket, Jarad Spatola wrote in one of many online discussion groups excoriating Apple for evidently using flimsy material in the product.
The display screen of Lee Ju-Sun’s nano shipped to him from Shenzhen, China, scratched after he put it in his pocket the first day he had it, he explained online.
Apple’s iPod nano has sold in record numbers around the world, just as it did in the US, Berman said. It seems that wherever the nano is sold, problems with the defective design soon follow.
Complaints that iPod nanos scratch and crack with irksome ease prompted Apple to offer to replace defective screens on the music players within weeks of its debut in September.
Trouble with screens cracking or easily scratching has affected less than a tenth of a per cent of the iPod nanos the company has shipped, Tom Neumayr of Apple said when the decision to replace defective screens was announced.
This is a real but minor issue involving a vendor quality problem in a small number of units, Neumayr said. "It is not a design issue."
The latest suit named Ben Jennings of the United Kingdom as plaintiff.
Mr. Jennings contended his nano screen was extensively marred with scratches despite his pains to safeguard the music player. If I had known the truth about the problem, I never would have purchased a nano, Mr. Jennings said.
The lawsuits charged that the problem was that nanos were designed with a layer of resin too thin to adequately guard against scratches.
The far-reaching response also reveals that this is not just a small problem or a bad batch of nano’s, but a defect in the overall design that should have been rectified prior to the release, Mr. Berman said.