San Francisco: PC major Dell has been used in the US by a consumer who filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, saying it “intentionally misled and deceived” buyers of its Alienware Area 51-m R1 gaming laptop.
Tom’s Hardware reports that the plaintiff Robert Felter, who is based in San Francisco, alleged in his lawsuit filed with the US District Court in the Northern District of California that Dell misled customers “to believe that the laptop would be upgradeable, possibly into future generations of components”.
“Dell’s advertisement to the public didn’t place any restrictions on the upgradeability of the laptop. They also never disclosed that those with the highest spec CPU and/or GPU that their device would not be upgradeable,” Felter’s lawyer was quoted as saying in the report last week.
Dell announced the Alienware Area 51-m R1 at the consumer electronics show (CES) in 2019.
The laptop offered a variety of 8th and 9th Gen Intel CPU options and graphics cards including Nvidia’s RTX 2070 and 2080.
However, when the Area-51m R2 was made available, it offered 10th Gen Intel CPUs and new GPUs were not available as upgrades for the R1.
The lawsuit claimed that consumers were told that “core components” (meaning the CPU and GPU) could be replaced beyond the current generation of hardware.
Dell declined to comment, saying the company’s policy is not to comment on pending litigation.
The lawsuit alleged that Dell should have been aware that Intel and Nvidia’s unannounced chips will not work with the gaming laptop.