How Dell dodged a class action suit over Alienware Area-51m GPU upgrades
In 2021, Dell got sued — because one year after hyping up an Alienware laptop that supposedly let you upgrade its discrete GPU, the company didn’t follow through.
The story of the Alienware Area-51m is pretty dang relevant today because Framework just opened preorders for another laptop that offers the same.
But it turns out Dell never had to meaningfully face that lawsuit. Area-51m buyers never successfully banded together in a class action case. Dell was able to force them into binding arbitration, I found, when I went looking to see what happened to the suit.
In July 2022, Judge Vince Chhabria told plaintiffs they had already agreed to binding arbitration “when they clicked ‘Accept’ on the start-up screen of their computers,” and...