Class Action Lawsuit Against Dell Regarding Alienware 51M R1 Laptop

We’ve already reported on the issue that buyers of the Alienware M15 R5 have had with the restricted number of operating CUDA cores in their RTX 3070 GPUs, now another critique has been leveled at Alienware and Dell.

This time it concerns the Alienware 51M R1 a.k.a. ‘Area 51’ laptop, specifically the marketing of said laptop.

The Issue With The Alienware 51M R1 Marketing

One of the big plus points in favor of Dell’s Alienware laptops is their purported ability to be upgraded and customized down the road, which is obviously a big selling point for PC gamers who like to eke out as much performance from their machines as possible.

However, one particular user / potential customer of Dell’s says that the company has falsely claimed, at least through inference, that the ‘Core Components’ (which the claimant says refers to the CPU and GPU of the laptop) were upgradable when in fact they were not.

Obviously, this is just a claim at present and Dell are likely to plead their innocence, but from a PR perspective, it’s not ideal, given the other issue with their Alienware m15 R5 launch.

You can see the full details of the claim below.

The Claims Against Dell

The exact wording of the claimant’s complaint against Dell is quoted below for those who want to read the detail:

1. This Complaint is necessary to redress the greed of Defendant, Dell Technologies (“Dell”), practiced to the detriment of its consumers. Dell intentionally misled and deceived the public in order to create a competitive advantage based on false representation to boost sales of its flagship gaming laptop, the Alienware Area 51M R1 (“Area 51M”), in the intensely competitive gaming laptop market segment.
2. It did so by affirmatively and falsely misrepresenting characteristics and qualities of the Area 51M that it knew did not exist, to lure unsuspecting customers to pay a higher price for the Area 51M than it merited without the represented qualities and characteristics, and to choose the Area 51M over other competing products, which might have been chosen had Dell accurately, and truthfully described the quality and characteristics of the Area 51M.
3. Most prominently, Dell falsely advertised to consumers that the Area 51M’s core hardware components, its Central Processing Unit (“CPU”), and its Graphics Processing Unit (“GPU”) (CPU and GPU are at times collectively referred to as “Core Components”), were fully upgradeable to future Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.
4. Core Components across different brands of gaming laptops are virtually identical with all manufacturers offering the same Intel CPUs and the same NVIDIA GPUs. For this reason, manufacturers are forced to differentiate and market their products based on other criteria such as price, aesthetics, and/or other unique features.
5. Core Components act as the central and graphics engines of a computer and are responsible for gaming performance. Unlike desktop computers, laptops have traditionally been built with permanently affixed CPUs and GPUs, making them impossible to remove and thus to upgrade. As a result, consumers are unable to swap their laptop’s existing Core Components for faster, more powerful, next-generation CPUs and GPUs. Rather, consumers must purchase an entirely new laptop when seeking an upgrade to next-generation Core Components powerful enough to play the latest, and more technologically demanding, computer games. This quality, in particular, limits the usable life, and consequently, the market value of gaming laptops. Dell’s representation that Area 51M had “unprecedented upgradeability” appeared to remove this limitation on product life and market value.
6. To the gaming consumer, this “unprecedented upgradeability” as Dell described it, i.e. a laptop that is upgradeable like a desktop, is the elusive holy grail of mobile computing. Dell went as far as to call the Area 51M a “mobile desktop” to further cement its alleged material capability that the Area 51M is upgradeable in the same way a desktop is upgradeable.
7. The Area 51M was released in the Summer of 2019, about a year before the end of the life cycle of its Core Component offerings. NVIDIA was set to release and did release, its updated, more powerful, mobile GPUs, the RTX 2060 SUPER, RTX 2070 SUPER, and RTX 2080 SUPER in or about June 2020, and its highly anticipated next-generation GPUs, the RTX 3000 series in the fall of 2020, which it released in September 2020. Additionally, INTEL was set to release its 10th generation CPUs in or about the second quarter of 2020. As such, without the represented “unprecedented upgradeability,” consumers had little incentive to purchase the Area 51M, which cost upwards of $5000 when fully optioned, knowing that its Core Components would become outdated in less than one year.
8. Dell knew it had to address consumers’ hesitation to purchase the Area 51M shortly before its Core Components became outdated. To that end, Dell represented that the Area 51M’s Core Components were upgradeable, thereby addressing any hesitation or apprehension consumers had regarding its soon-to-be outdated Core Components.
9. In reality, the Area 51M’s Core Components were not upgradeable. Dell has admitted that. Dell falsely told consumers that the Area 51M’s Core Components were upgradeable to motivate buyers unwilling to purchase a gaming laptop near the end of its Core Components’ generational life cycle and to create a significant (though false) competitive advantage against other gaming laptop manufacturers, as no other company offered a laptop with such capability at the time the Area 51M went on sale.
10. Plaintiffs, therefore, seek restitution from Dell for violation of the False Advertising Law and Unfair Competition Law, damages for fraudulent misrepresentation, and injunctive relief pursuant to the Consumers Legal Remedies Act.