Apple to pay up to $395 to people with broken MacBook Butterfly keyboards

If you bought a MacBook with one of Apple’s low-profile butterfly switch keyboards, if you’ve ever had a keyboard repaired, and if you live in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, or Washington state, good news! A judge has approved a $50 million class action lawsuit settlement that Apple agreed to in July, meaning payments to affected users (and attorneys involved) could begin soon.

According to Macworld, there will be three payout tiers: $50 for people who have had individual keycaps replaced, $125 for people who have had one keyboard replacement, and $395 for people who have had two or more replacements.

For those unfamiliar, MacBooks introduced between 2015 and 2019 used a new low-profile keyboard with a butterfly-switching mechanism that saved space but also resulted in sturdier keys that moved less than before. Early complaints were mostly subjective and concerned the feel of the keyboard compared to previous scissor switch designs. But over time, it became clear that butterfly switch keyboards failed more often than scissor switch designs. These problems persisted despite at least four major changes to the butterfly switch mechanism.

While the company has never admitted fault (and claims, despite the class action lawsuit, that it did nothing wrong), Apple launched a repair program in 2018 that offered four years of free repair to owners of all butterfly-enabled MacBook models. keyboards. Tellingly, this program covered all MacBook models with a butterfly switch, including those introduced after the launch of the repair program, suggesting that there were flaws in the design that Apple could not address with hardware versions. Apple reintroduced a modified scissor-switch keyboard in the 16-inch MacBook Pro in late 2019, and all MacBooks released since then have continued to use scissor-switch designs.

The settlement that was approved today is the result of a lawsuit that was upgraded to class-action lawsuit status in March 2021. If you live in one of the seven eligible states and have your keyboard replaced through Apple, you should be automatically contacted about your payout, but you can find more information on KeyboardSettlement.com when the site goes live.

For users currently using a broken butterfly switch keyboard, Apple’s keyboard maintenance program is still active, although the number of models it covers has been slowly decreasing over time. The program “covers eligible MacBooks, MacBook Airs, and MacBook Pros for 4 years after the device’s first retail sale,”which at this point mostly excludes the first wave of butterfly keyboard Macs introduced between 2015 and 2017.