Apple’s Butterfly Keyboard Payouts Begin (Did You Get Yours?)
Toggle Dark Mode
It’s been nearly five years since Apple abandoned its beleaguered butterfly keyboards, but the company is still paying the price for its bad decisions.
Following years of complaints from customers who encountered problems with the butterfly keyboard and a spate of lawsuits, Apple finally agreed to pay $50 million to those affected by the issues in 2022. However, as class action lawsuits go, it’s taken another two years to wind its way through the system.
Everything was pretty quiet until last month when we saw an update that a payment order had finally been issued. Now, it looks like the cheques have begun landing in the hands of class action participants, according to folks at The Verge and 9to5Mac who recently received theirs.
The payments could run as high as $395 if you were a MacBook owner who had two or more keyboard replacements performed, although that drops to $125 for those who had only one replacement and $50 if Apple merely had to change some keycaps to fix the problem.
However, the fact that many people had to have their keyboards replaced multiple times within the first few years of owning their MacBook shows how serious the problem was — and why the class action lawsuit was necessary in the first place.
The Sad Saga of the Butterfly Keyboard
The story of the butterfly keyboard began in 2015 when Apple released its 12-inch MacBook. In an attempt to produce the slimmest MacBook ever and replicate its 2008 success with the original MacBook Air, Apple had to make certain compromises. One of these was to switch out the traditional scissor-switch style keyboard that had long been used on its laptops with a new “butterfly” design.
That change alone let it reduce the thickness of its MacBook by up to 40 percent, so it was no surprise that the butterfly keyboard soon came to the rest of the family, starting with the MacBook Pro in 2016 and eventually extending to the MacBook Air.
All told, nearly every MacBook sold from 2015 to 2019 used some variation of the butterfly keyboard, but that wasn’t because it proved to be a hit with customers. Even in the early models, MacBook owners reported problems with sticky and non-responsive keys only weeks after purchase.
While that wasn’t a problem that affected everyone, it was a large enough group that Apple should have begun paying attention. Instead, it stubbornly stuck with the butterfly keyboard design, leading frustrated MacBook owners to petition Apple for a recall in early 2018. Thousands of customers signed on, and prominent Apple supporters even levied harsh criticism against Apple, including John Gruber, who called it “one of the biggest design screwups in Apple history.
This petition was followed by a class-action lawsuit, alleging the keyboards were “prone to fail” and that despite being aware of how widespread the problem was, Apple had not only failed to act but had continued releasing new MacBooks with the same issues.
Despite awareness of the keyboard defect, Apple equipped future model MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops with the butterfly keyboard, and continued selling these laptops to consumers at premium prices.
Following this, Apple tried to placate MacBook owners with a free repair program, but it stopped short of acknowledging that the keyboards were actually a problem, nor did it stop using them in new MacBooks. Instead, it tweaked the design, resulting in three different generations of butterfly keyboards, none of which entirely solved the issues.
It wasn’t until early 2019 that Apple issued a public apology for the keyboard issues. The company tried to downplay the problem by saying it only affected “a small number of users,” but at least it uttered the word “sorry.”
A few weeks after that admission, Apple began a priority repair program that offered next-day repairs for those faulty Macs. Still, in a darkly ironic twist, Apple released more MacBooks with the bad keyboard design, likely because they were already in the production pipeline and it was cheaper to offer free repairs than scrapping those units and starting over.
However, by the end of 2019, we saw the first sign that the butterfly keyboard’s days were finally numbered. Apple’s new 16-inch MacBook Pro returned to the scissor-switch design, and the rest of the family followed in early 2020.
The settlement covers MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro owners in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Washington, and with the payments now going out, it hopefully spells the end of this particularly dark chapter in Apple’s MacBook history.
