Topline
A judge on Monday certified a class action lawsuit against Apple over its controversial butterfly keyboard, a blow to Apple as it tries to move past years of complaints dogging its MacBook lineup.
Detail of a 2017 Apple MacBook laptop, taken on July 7, 2017.
Photo by Neil Godwin/T3 Magazine/Future via Getty Images
Key Facts
The lawsuit, first filed in 2018, alleges Apple knowingly sold defective keyboards, and that its attempts to fix the problem never actually addressed underlying design flaws.
California District Court judge Edward Davila ruled that the suit can move forward as a class action case, according to filing unsealed last week, which was first reported by the Verge.
The class covers MacBook customers in California, New York, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey and Washington who purchased a 12-inch MacBook between 2015 and 2017, a MacBook Pro between 2016 and 2019 and the MacBook Air between 2018 and 2019.
The lawsuit makes the same complaints customers have been noticing for years, including that some keys fail to register or repeat multiple times after one press due to a “low-travel” design shortening how far users have to press down on a key down to type.
Apple apologized for the issue and maintained that problems only affected a small number of customers, though the company eventually discontinued the butterfly keyboard in 2020. (Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Forbes.)
Crucial Quote
“No matter how much lipstick you try to put on this pig. . . it’s still ugly,” an Apple executive wrote in reference to the butterfly keyboard, according to the lawsuit.
Key Background
First introduced in 2015, Apple’s butterfly keyboard ditched industry-standard “scissor” switches and instead used a different “butterfly” mechanism, which allowed MacBooks to be thinner than ever before. Shortly after, complaints started rolling in as customers noticed that a small speck of dust or debris could get caught between the keys, preventing them from working properly. Apple introduced an extended warranty program covering butterfly keyboard issues in 2018 and made a series of design changes in subsequent generations, such as adding an elastic membrane to block out particles. But Wall Street Journal columnist Joanna Stern wrote as recently as 2019 that those updates still weren’t working.
Tangent
This isn’t the only hardware flaw causing legal issues for Apple. Last year, Apple paid $113 million to settle a lawsuit from 34 state attorneys general over the infamous “Batterygate” scandal. Apple was accused of secretly slowing down older iPhones to preserve battery performance, but denied any wrongdoing in the settlement.
