At least two news items posted have appeared in prominent web sites relating to a lawsuit filed against Apple purporting Apple misleads buyers by claiming 16.7 million colors displayed by MacBooks and MacBook Pro laptops, but fewer color are actually displayed. This has and may further doubts in general about laptops and about LCD displays of all kinds. However, what the lawsuit actually claims says nothing about the display or its quality, but that maybe the video driver only actually produces 6-bit information that goes to the display, which would result in fewer than 16.7 million colors.

The facts are that similar strategies for display have been employed by many makers of laptop computers. And it has long been assumed by computer users that equivalent display quality should not be expected from a laptop compared to a graphics quality pro desktop computer. However, many pro photographers have been using laptops for doing image work in the field quite successfully and have not reported a serious display discrepancy or change in image files between their laptop and their desktop computers.

The only problem here is that some people found an apparent performance discrepancy in specifications that provides an apparent basis for a claim and opportunity to sue a corporation with deep pockets.

The reality is that human vision is not capable of distinguishing 16.7 million different colors. In fact most people find it difficult to distinguish perceptually between Adobe RGB and sRGB images although there is about a 30% smaller color gamut displayed by sRGB.

In other words this is really just a tempest in a teapot that has little practical affect on computer display performance in terms of what a user is capable of perceiving on-screen. It should be ignored and not be allowed to be a cause of concern to laptop or desktop computer users.