Apple’s ill-fated butterfly keyboard may be dead, but the company isn’t done paying for the pain it has caused customers.
This week, the Cupertino electronics giant agreed to pay $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit, according to court documents released Monday [
PDF]. Plaintiffs in the now four-year-old court battle alleged Apple knowingly concealed the fact that its butterfly keyboards were prone to failure and argued steps by Apple to mitigate the defect were inadequate.
The keyboard design at issue made its debut in 2015 alongside the short-lived MacBook — a 12-inch ultra portable powered by a passively cooled Intel Core-M processor. In order to accommodate a larger battery into the slim aluminum chassis, Apple introduced a new “butterfly” keyboard mechanism, which had a shallower travel than traditional scissor-switches used in prior generation MacBooks and most PC laptops.
Despite early warning signs that dust and debris could work their way into the mechanism rendering it inoperable, Apple brought the keyboard design to its mainstream MacBook Pro line a year later and the MacBook Air in 2018.
As the butterfly switch saw widespread adoption, reports of sticking or inoperable keys became
commonplace. However, Apple remained silent on the issue, at one point advising customers with sticking keys to invert their notebooks and direct compressed air at the keyboard deck.
In subsequent MacBook models, Apple
modified the mechanism, apparently in an attempt to mitigate failures, and eventually added a membrane around the switches, seemingly in an attempt to limit the ingress of foreign particles.
Eventually, Apple said it would replace the keyboards on affected notebooks at no cost for a period of four years after purchase, under a
service program. That repair would have otherwise cost customers several hundred dollars if out of warranty.
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