Apple Settles MacBook Pro Lawsuit for $250,000

On Wednesday, Apple Inc settled a 10-month-old lawsuit regarding its MacBook notebook displays.  The terms of the settlement were not disclosed publicly, but one Apple executive who spoke on condition of anonymity told us they’ve settled the suit for $250,000.

The settlement potentially saved Apple Inc millions of dollars in court expenses.

The lawsuit was filed last May by two professional photographers, Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley, who argued that the company falsely advertised the capabilities of their MacBook Pros as being able to display “millions of colors.”

Peter Polischuk, attorney for Greaves and Gatley, said the plaintiffs didn’t pursuit it further because it was difficult to find other people who were wronged because they had bought Macs solely based on the “millions of colors” claim.

Mac OS X users can set the Color option in the Displays screen (under System Preferences) to “millions”, but the MacBook Pro uses a 6-bit display and to achieve “millions” numbers, Apple uses so dithering technique which blends pixels together to create a shading effect.

The plaintiffs claimed that this use of dithering affected their ability to edit their photos and constituted false advertising, since a 6-bit display is capable only of rendering 262,144 colors without resorting to dithering, not “millions.”

The displays are only capable of displaying the illusion of millions of colors through the use of a software technique referred to as ‘dithering,’  the lawsuit claimed.