Yes, this is a genuine question. In every case I've seen, the payout for the class members has been too low to even bother getting it paid out - but perhaps there are exceptions?
In the UK one concern is a lot of trading standards offices have been gutted locally over the past 10 years due to austerity cuts hitting local councils hardest meaning consumers have some difficulty getting action without going to court when it concerns local businesses.
Actually going to court is an act of last resort for exceptional cases or when a regulator fails in their duties (and even then regulators have their own regulators, ombudsman, often times for escalating complaints).
Any case has more goals than restitution to the victim.
And I think it is actually good lawyers get well paid here. They are representing public interest and fighting large organization.
That's hardly something you or I can do, even assuming you had time to put your life on hold to fight Apple over broken LCD.
In a class action like that usually, if it is won, judge orders the company to right the wrong, depending on some estimate of culpability. If they just made an honest mistake they would probably be punished much less than if they did it knowingly.
A lot of times it is difficult to show they knowingly deceived customers and that's why you might see those seemingly unfair payouts.
Apple seems to have learning difficulties then.
It is probably cheaper for them to absorb these than improve r&d and production and pay in delaying product launch. And it seems the market is quite inflexible - most people seem to absolutely have to buy it even if it breaks if you look the wrong way at it.
Normally repeated class actions should discourage customers, but Apple seems immune to it.
Though I would like to see honest numbers of how many units are affected with which fault, then compare to competition.
Maybe it is just the case that Apple customers are louder with their demands because the loss was more financially painful to them.
It's like the old debate of who's responsible for forcing change on plastic production. The consumer buying veggies or the regulators? It's clearly the regulators and companies, even though people like to blame the consumer for not making the right choice.
It's how we justify the bad actors behaviour, just because they're more powerful and we want to rationalize it somehow.
To me it shows what class actions are for -- a serious pollution incident which effected many people, but required a huge court case against a huge company to deal with. Many people recieved 6 figure sums, enough to move away and pay for medical care.
It isn't a prefect story -- PG&E should have arguably paid even more, given the fact they basically poisoned an entire town, and knew about it for years.
The source of the issue seems to have been lead-free solder, which was adopted in the mid-2000s and seemed to cause problems for a decade or so.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2014/10/28/apple-class-action-lawsuit-20...
[2] https://www.cultofmac.com/482762/apple-no-longer-repairing-2...