Foul seems like the wrong thing to do. Who would purposely "foul?"

But if you don't foul, you're not playing at the peak of your game. A team that isn't fouling isn't playing hard.

If a computer company is perfect - any computer company - they're waiting too long to go to market with new products. Innovation requires a certain percentage of fouls.

The issue is where is the line? If more than a tolerable threshold of products fail, then the line is in the wrong place. But if more than a certain threshold are perfect, then the line is also in the wrong place.

A friend of mine bought a Mac Pro with a similar issue. The graphics were similarly malfunctioning due to overheating. He was outraged. He just spent all this money, and his computer didn't work. After a ghetto workaround, Apple replaced his graphics card with a better model.

Obviously anyone who just bought a 17" computer that doesn't work should be outraged. Just as obviously, it'll get fixed. But from a strategic level, if the issue effects a negligible percentage, it's better to incur and fix, then to ensure 100% perfection and innovate at a slower pace.

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If an auto maker shipped a car with a faulty clutch, there would be a mandatory recall. I can understand flaws in code. But this isn't a bug. This is defective manufacturing. Which, at least since the Intel switch, has been the norm from Cupertino. There were the MooBook problems, problems where Apple was shipping MacBooks with plastic covering the vents, and display problems across the entire line (like the fry&freeze problem with the iMacs). This is not a "we want perfection but have to ship something eventually" problem. This is a lack of quality control problem.

Nvidia chips have heat issues and have had those issues for years. Apple shouldn't have put such a chip in an enclosure that does not allow for peak heat dissipation. Or, if Apple wants to use Nvidia, it should focus on heat dispersal. The chip being faulty is Nvidia's problem. The choice to use it is Apple's problem.

The market allows this behavior because it has been drilled into people's minds that it is to be expected. You can't engineer perfection. But you can have proper quality control measures in place. And Apple's QC department is negligible.

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I definitely think that these Macbooks have cooling problems which cause considerable damage to the graphics, even if they don't get very hot externally, their tight form factors can bring much difficulty.

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Or they did know about it and determined the cost:benefit of having some faulty cards was worth the return on combined defective/effective unit sales.

Econ 101

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Hey, if your name is on the box, you gotta check every component for quality even if you are outsourcing design/production of some components to someone else.

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Incidently my first generation MacBook Pro's graphic card just crapped out.

The ATI Radeon X1600 Mobility.

Getting vertical lines in the browser window or while watching movies. Seems to definitely be heat related.

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