Dell sued over Alienware laptop’s ‘unprecedented upgradeability’ claims
2Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522265/dell-alienware-area-51m-r1-gaming-laptop-upgradeability-unprecedented-lawsuit-claims-misleading
Reported today in The Verge.
Dell sued over Alienware laptop's 'unprecedented upgradeability' claims
Dell is being sued in California over its claims that its Alienware Area-51m R1 laptop would offer "unprecedented upgradeability," Tom's Hardware reports. Alienware customer Robert Felter is accusing the company of running a "false and misleading" marketing campaign, in which it promised that the laptop's core components, including the CPU and GPU, could be swapped out for more powerful models. A year later, the Area-51m R1's successor was announced with new components not available as upgrades for the original model.
"Consumers were misled by Dell's false and misleading marketing campaign and paid a significant premium for the Area 51M R1 under the incorrect belief that this 'unprecedented upgradeability' would save them money in the long run by allowing them to upgrade their laptop's Core Components rather than having to purchase an entirely new upgraded laptop," the suit alleges.
Dell announced the Alienware Area 51-m R1 at CES 2019. The laptop offered a variety of 8th and 9th Gen Intel CPU options (including the i7-8700, i7-9700K, or i9-9900K processors) and graphics cards including Nvidia's RTX 2070 and 2080. However, when the Area-51m R2 was announced the following May, it offered 10th Gen Intel CPUs and new GPUs including the RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080 Super not available as upgrades for the R1.
If you go back and look at the specific promises Dell made when it announced the original laptop, it doesn't seem to have technically broken any of them. It said the laptop would only support Intel CPUs that used its Z390 chipset, which was compatible with the 8th and 9th-generation processors in the original R1 laptop. However, when Dell announced the R2, the new 10th-