Where there’s smoke, there’s class action payments

Ah, the yo-yo power adapter. I always though it was a bit of a misnomer, since if you ever tried to actually use it as a yo-yo, you quickly discovered that it was worthless. Frankly, it wasn’t much better as a power adapter, either. Though I appreciated the built-in cable management, I was far more distressed by the fact that it often seemed to spark and flash when I plugged it in. I ended up burning through a couple of these suckers while I owned a Pismo and later a G3 iBook.

And apparently, I was not alone. A story in this morning’s Los Angeles Times says that Apple has agreed to pay refunds of $25 to $79 to as many as 2.3 million Mac users who ended up buying replacement power adapters for certain PowerBooks and iBooks because of faulty power adapters. A class action suit was launched in 2006, contending that Apple had misrepresented problems with its power adapters after recalling just 570,000 of them in 2001.

I really like the current era power adapters over the yo-yo, but they have their share of problems too; I had to buy a replacement a month or two ago after MagSafe cord frayed where it connected to the brick. Still, at least they haven’t caught on fire yet.

Anyway, there’s a final approval hearing scheduled for September 8th, so I imagine we’ll have details on where you can queue up for your cash after that.