A U.S. judge, in what must have been an amazing moment of legal clarity, ruled this week that Apple isn’t to blame if you drop your iPhone and break it.
Judge Edward Davila of the San Jose District Court this week rejected a local man’s attempt to sue the Cupertino giant over a cracked iPhone 4 panel, stating “it is a well known fact of life that glass can break under impact”.
The plaintiff, Betsalel Williamson, needed to have his iPhone repaired after he knocked the device off of the arm of a chair. The resulting swift loss of altitude, followed immediately by a sudden de-acceleration trauma, (it fell, and had a hard landing on the floor), resulted in the iPhone’s rear-facing glass breaking.
Williamson wanted the court to tell Apple they needed to reimburse him for the resulting repairs, saying his case showed that Apple’s claims in advertising that the handset’s glass paneling was “gorilla” tough were clearly misleading.
Nope, not gonna do it, ruled the judge.
“A ‘reasonable consumer’ viewing a commercial showing the iPhone 4 in use as a phone, but without a cover, would not be misled to believe that the iPhone 4 could withstand any particular level of impact if the phone was dropped,” he wrote in his verdict.
In other words, pay the bill Mr. Williamson, next case please.
Williamson was given the opportunity to revise his complaint to show specific examples of Apple’s alleged misleading advertising.
