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Man says his laptop's battery life sucks, so he sues

A Massachusetts man who says he's lucky to get five hours use out of a Lenovo laptop that promises nine hours of battery life is suing the manufacturer for the more than $5 million he says he and "hundreds of thousands" of other Lenovo users are owed for the allegedly deceptive advertising.

In a suit filed this week in US District Court in Boston, Orlando Medeiros said he never would have shelled out the extra money for the allegedly high-end Yoga 2 Pro if he knew the "up to nine hours" of advertised battery life was really closer to just four - even when he puts the computer in "power saver" mode. Also:

The battery life of the laptop has continued to deteriorate since he purchased the laptop at a much faster rate than is typical for laptop batteries.

Medeiros is seeking to become lead plaintiff in a class-action suit against the company, whose US headquarters are in North Carolina:

Lenovo’s representations were unfair because Lenovo, as a sophisticated laptop manufacturer, knew or should have known that its representations concerning battery life were not true, and by making false representations concerning the battery life of the Yoga 2 Pro, Lenovo acted immorally, unethically, and unscrupulously toward consumers, causing substantial injury to Plaintiff and the Class.

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Comments

what do you expect when you buy a lenovo laptop.....

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the multiplayer Call of Duty had nothing to do with the shortened battery life.

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I recently bought a HP laptop and the charger cable was defective and wouldn't keep the thing charged. I called HP and they sent me a new cord and that solved the problem. Maybe this guy just got a bad battery and he should have asked for a new one instead of asking for Five Million dollars.

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The difference is that your proposal is reasonable. His complaint is not. This man probably lives his entire life with unreasonable expectations.

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Conversely... if in fact they are deliberately, consistently, and systematically misrepresenting the capabilities of their batteries, then calling them up and asking for a replacement doesn't fix the problem, but hitting them with a class action suit does...

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have been killed or seriously injured because they only get six hours life out of their laptop instead of the "promised" up to nine hours, that it justifies the legal cost and time of cluttering up the courts with what is really nothing more than a frivilous lawsuit.

The fact is that, the current bar (no pun intended) for filing lawsuits is set way too low. And claims of deceptive advertising should be investigated and punished by state consumer protection offices and other agenices that have been created for that very reason (enforcement of consumer protection laws), and not by individuals and their lawyers who are looking to make a fast buck.

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Laptop battery faults [no charge holding] and battery fires are very much a problem. In part it is a problem driven by increasing demands for consumers for longer life and higher draw from the batteries. But nonetheless manufacturers are very much guilty of deceit and releasing dangerous products and not a single laptop builder is not complicit in some way.

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Do you seriously believe that a product needs to kill or seriously injure someone before a suit over misleading advertising is warranted?

Let's say you bought $1,000 worth of "exterior paint", and paid another $4,000 in labor to have it applied to your house, and then it all washed off in the first rainstorm, and you tried to sue the manufacturer. Would you find that a frivolous lawsuit because nobody had been injured or killed?

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Yeah, maybe everyone should just send their batteries back. I can't find a single review that lists the actual battery life lasting over 6 hours.

Totally frivolous! Companies shouldn't be expected to be truthful when sharing bits of information which drive consumers to purchase their products. /snark

In all seriousness, you know that he's not asking for $5 million personally, right? This is a class action suit, not tort.

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the guy's lawyer will get $4,999,000. And everyone else will have to split the remaining $1,000.

Unless they agree to a "settlemet" whereby everyone in the suit gets a cupon for $20 towards the purchase of a new laptop. Which is usually the result of "necessary" lawsuits like this one.

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The point is to stick Lenovo with a $5M tab, to discourage them and other manufacturers from lying in the future. The purpose is served whether the $5M goes to the law firm or to the plaintiffs or whether the Joker piles up the $5M in cash and burns it.

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to question ambigious statments like "up to nine hours of battery life" before buying the product in the first place.

But it seems everyone is trying to get an undeserved lottery payout these days. Shameful we have a legal system that wastes everyone's time and resources by encouraging this type of nonsense.

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Or perhaps companies should be able to back up their claims. Apple advertises up to 12 hours of battery life on the larger of the Macbook Airs, and third party reviews have even cleared that amount. The "up tos" should reflect actual testing, and repeatable results. It appears Lenovo was probably able to coax 9 hours once, and uses that as the "up to", or they're just lying. Their results don't appear to be repeatable.

And he's not looking for a payout. This is a class action suit. If anything, the lawyer is looking for a payout, but that's another argument altogether. If not for these "wasteful" and "nonsense" types of lawsuits, companies could basically harm or mislead the general public with no repercussions, be it getting people to buy inferior products like this, levying insane fees on their customers, all the way up to hiding the severity of injuries of its employees, and lying about how dangerous their products can be.

You're making it sound like class action suits are the new version of slipping and falling in supermarkets to collect a payout.

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The things that get heavy press coverage must be a huge societal problem!

Like silly-sounding lawsuits and anything Nancy Grace latches onto!

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I have a feeling most "up to" numbers are mathematically calculated, not experimentally determined. Take the minimum in use power consumption and the capacity of a perfect battery and you have how long it could last.

Experimentally, there are so many factors that can affect (and really only negatively) the power consumption and battery capacity, which mostly result from user use (and error).

I'd imagine there is an asterisk and very fine print on any advertising that promotes the battery life which basically says it isn't the true battery life without explicitly saying it.

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and ask yourself "What real harm did these people suffer?" That's what makes this lawsuit frivilous.

And perhaps we should be encouraging people to be more vigilant and research claims of performance BEFORE buying products in the first place, instead of allowing them to file idiotic lawsuits that only make lawyers richer and waste time and resources that could be better spent on addressing real problems in society. That IMO would be far more effective in discouraging companies from making unsubstantiated claims about their products.

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"waste time and resources that could be better spent on addressing real problems in society. That IMO would be far more effective in discouraging companies from making unsubstantiated claims about their products."

So you begin with a false dilemma, and then state that the dilemma, which is "addressing real problems in society", will make companies stop making unsubstantiated claims about products. Could you please share what these "real problems" are, and why they'll magically solve the issue of false claims, better than actually bringing the company to court over the false claim? It's just a bunch of word salad if you're not actually stressing what they should instead address, and how it will make things better.

I guess we can agree to disagree on what "harm" can entail. Personally, getting less value or utility out of a product than what you paid (and only purchasing the product due to false claims)--that is economic harm. It's really boiling down to a semantic debate when you're keying on the meaning of a word. The law considers misrepresentation as a form of harm, so you're incorrect _if_ it is shown Lenovo did misrepresent through their claims.

And for the love of all things good, as a society, when do we stop blaming victims? Seriously, that someone is taking a company at their word and entered into a transaction under false pretenses, they obviously could have known better (and personally, I research everything), but it certainly isn't fair to say they should have known better. I see this all the time when people get ripped off, or emotionally or physically harmed by someone who was "known" to do that type of thing, and so on. At what point do we actually focus on those committing the wrong, not the victims of deceit?

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My parents got a Lenovo Flex 2 that only gets 1 hour 50 minutes of battery life.
Honestly, anything less than 4 hours battery life is disgraceful. I personally need a laptop with 12+ hours of battery life, but there are no affordable ones out there.

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"up to"

My computer can get "up to" eight hours on a battery - if I'm on a seven hour flight and doing mostly reading and typing, yes.

Internet, video, gaming, etc.? Four hours.

Battery life is like highway mileage. It is based on test cycles, and assumptions, and is what you might expect if what you are doing matches those. Drive around town, and you won't get the 45 mpg you have been "promised". Take a road trip and you will.

This lawsuit would be equivalent to me suing VW because I didn't get 45mpg in traffic on a subzero cold morning.

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Excessive litigation is often the only tool consumers have to fight back against deceptive companies. If Lenovo really has been misleading about their laptops, which could be determined over the course of this suit, then this action is a good thing. If they haven't, then this dude is out the time and money it took to bring on a frivilous lawsuit.

It's easy to laugh at a guy disatisfied with his laptops' performance, but if Lenovo really is being deceptive, what other course of action do consumers really have to hold the company accountable? It's not like you can organize enough Lenovo customers for any other kind of action, nor do uninvolved consumers have any interest in this case. There aren't really any options other than class-action lawsuits.

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Lucky that he wasn't forced into "mandatory binding arbitration."

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I have a sneaking suspicion that the plaintiff shelled out the extra money for this Lenovo laptop because he thought the battery WOULDN'T last 9 hours, allowing him to file this $5 million lawsuit.

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Is it not possible he has left the charger plugged in after the battery was fully charged. This kills the battery if he has done it multiple times.

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because only a 9 cell would last that long, under certain conditions. A 9 cell battery is very bulky, and I'm not aware of any laptop coming standard with a 9 cell, most come standard with a 3 or sometimes 6 cell.

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I have one.. it has a 8 cell battery. But its also a 10lb desktop replacement laptop.

I believe some Dell Models I order come with 9 cell batteries. (XPS boat anchors do)

But yes most consumer laptops (i.e. ones bought at BestBuy or MicroCenter) are 3 or 6 cell.

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For a laptop I bought in 1996. Around 1999 a class-action suit over the battery life settled up and one of the options in the settlement was a new battery, which was pretty useful to me at the time.

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