The butterfly keyboard class action lawsuit is finally settling after a long drawn-out period. Citing foreign technology media Law360 reported that Apple plans to pay a $50 million settlement, and the motion has received preliminary approval from a federal judge in California.
Of the $50 million settlement, $13.6 million goes to pay attorneys’ fees, $2 million to pay litigation costs and $1.4 million for users to pay settlement administration fees, leaving the rest to be distributed to the members involved in the class action.
The keystrokes, which date back as far as 2018, cover customers in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Washington who complained that Apple was well aware of problems with the keyboard mechanism used on MacBook Pro machines between 2015 and 2019. The lawsuit alleges that Apple concealed the defect from consumers in order to continue selling the devices.
Apple introduced the butterfly keyboard on MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro devices in 2015 and 2016, claiming that the keyboard provided superior key feel and stability while also allowing for a thinner design. Soon after the Butterfly keyboards were introduced, customers discovered that they were prone to failure.
Thousands of users have experienced repeated key presses and problems with dust and other particles getting into the butterfly mechanism and causing the keys to fail. These complaints led to a huge controversy over the butterfly technology, and Apple eventually launched a keyboard repair program in June 2018.
The repair program only covered MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air models for four years, and Apple just replaced the Butterfly keyboard with another one, so some customers had repeat failures that ended up being no longer covered. For this reason, Apple’s repair program is inadequate, the lawsuit says.
Apple tried to iterate on the butterfly mechanism to make it more durable, but it went through three generations without solving the problem. Apple had to replace the butterfly keyboards with more reliable scissor-switch keyboards, with the company phasing out the last of them in 2020. All Macs now use the scissor switch mechanism and don’t suffer from the same problem.
