People are slow. The masses that comment at Digg and Apple Defects especially so. Two words are being thrown around that are really being used out of context in all the discussion about MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Yellow Journalism

When someone accuses you of yellow journalism, you have been accused of whoring the truth. You are not being called a liar, or being told that anything you said is factually incorrect. What’s being said is that you’re saying it out of context, missing data, or using a small data set to imply a much larger problem than really exists.

If I said that Apple iBook G3s had a far-reaching video problem and that one should question Apple’s design of the product, that would be correct as there is ample evidence to support that. In fact, if I were to talk about such a thing I could prevent the accusation of yellow journalism by actually quoting and naming sources and making myself available for contact about the issue.

If, however, I said that MacBook Pro screens are detaching themselves and that it was reproducible and lamented about the quality control and so on, so forth without quoting multiple sources or including a picture of it without someone prying it off the front of the computer then that would be yellow journalism. Did the screen detach itself? No one knows for sure, but by throwing it out there as fact and saying it’s a manufacturing defect with the whole line rather than one or two units without backing up the claim, you’re right in the realm of misleading facts and unfounded conclusions. It’s not a lie that the bezel separated (I give some credit) but the conclusion is a fallacy.

Defect

A defect is “a shortcoming, imperfection, or lack” according to Oxford’s American English dictionary. It is not when something doesn’t work the way you expect it to. It’s not when something isn’t designed the way you would have done it. It’s not when something fails to meet your expectations.

It’s when there are published design goals for an item and it falls short of those goals. Too much thermal paste is not a defect when the system functions similarly with properly-applied paste.