Back in January MacCentral first brought readers news of a class action suit filed against Apple by King & Ferlauto, a Los Angeles-based law firm which alleged Apple violated California law by not more fully supporting PowerPC G3-based Macs with Mac OS X. The lawyer responsible for filing the suit today told MacCentral that the suit has been amended, a meeting with a judge is set, and Apple may have modified its position, at least in online documentation.
King & Ferlauto said in its January filing that Apple’s early promises to “fully optimize” Mac OS X for G3-based systems implied that users who migrated to the new operating system would retain features like DVD movie playback, QuickTime acceleration and 3D graphics acceleration, all features they are able to use with Mac OS 9. King & Ferlauto described this design decision as a “willful failure” on Apple’s part to write drivers to support certain ATI-based graphics systems present in these older machines, rather than any technical shortcoming of either the operating system or the hardware present.
In late December Apple offered in its online KnowledgeBase support database system that “Further Mac OS X support for the graphic accelerators listed above is not planned,” referring specifically to these older ATI graphics chip-based systems.
King & Ferlauto is scheduled to go before a judge today with an amended copy of their original complaint, now with the names of 22 plaintiffs, including some outside California.
In the interim, something interesting has happened, according to King & Ferlauto partner Thomas M. Ferlauto. Yesterday, Ferlauto contended, Apple updated its online information about support for these older systems in the company’s KnowledgeBase system.
“Where it used to say: ‘Further support for the graphic accelerator chipsets listed above is not planned’ it now reads: ‘Further support for the graphic accelerator chipsets listed above is being investigated for a future version of Mac OS X,'” noted Ferlauto.
An Apple spokesperson contacted for this article was unable to comment as MacCentral went to press.
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