It would be great if they could fix this issue. I would be overjoyed. However, they seem to be unable to, now even going so far as talking the defect down.
Unacceptable to who? The products in question are selling by the millions. Clearly, the market finds them very acceptable. In the grand scheme of things, what you think is largely irrelevant.
That must be why he bought one.
I mean, how deluded can you be to talk down this problem? It’s a defect product, pure and simple.
Is the retina display "defect" a significantly different thing? (I can't tell from any of the commentary I've heard whether its a "permanent, irreversible screen change", or a temporary "ghosting" of previous display only persistent over a few second/minute/hours timescale.)
I mean, Apple seems to agree, at least for now. Every single Apple employee I talked to immediately recognised it as an obvious and unacceptable defect. (The one employee I showed it to first exclaimed “Holy shit!”, I didn’t even have to say anything beyond “Could you please hide the Safari window?”) And that’s what it is.