After lots of reports of logic-board failures on iBooks, along with threats of class-action lawsuits (background from Wired), Apple has announced a program to cover logic-board failures for the next three years, replacing faulty boards at no cost to the customer, and refunding any service costs already incurred. Some people will be delighted to hear this; some of them went through quite a few replacement iBooks that exhibited the same problem. Must have been frustrating.

Still, based on Apple’s past behaviour regarding noisy Power Macs (see previous entry) and iPod batteries, it might be a mistake to characterize this as an action taken “under threat of a class-action lawsuit,” as Macintouch does. Rightly or wrongly, Apple seems to have a practice of not commenting on repair and replacement programs until they’re in place and ready to roll, which means they’re silent on the issue longer than they could be. As a result, they don’t move fast enough to satisfy their customers, who know about the problems long before the program is ready. To be fair, Apple isn’t likely to know that it’s more than an isolated issue until they get complaints by the truckload, but they’d benefit from a quicker response.