Years after Apple’s butterfly keyboards started acting up, it looks like the company is ready to settle.
Apple’s plan to pay $50 million to settle the class action lawsuit just received preliminary approval from a federal judge, pushing the case one step closer to conclusion.
It’s been a long time coming. The butterfly keyboard class action lawsuit found in MacBooks, MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros covers machines launched between 2015 and 2016. The lawsuit arose in 2018 and became a class action in 2021and it serves customers in California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington and New York.
Apple originally agreed to the $50 million settlement in July 2022. Now the United States District Court for the Northern District of California has moved the case forward by granting preliminary approval for the settlement. The order was signed by Judge Edward J. Davila. As Apple has already given its consent, it will pay $50 million for the settlement – but not all of this sum will be paid to the representatives of the class.
According MacRumors, $17 million will be spent on attorneys’ fees ($13.6 million), court costs ($2 million) and administrative costs ($1.4 million). The rest of the funds will be distributed among the group members. The final amount for each member will depend on the number of repairs that had to be made. MacRumors says up to $395 will be paid out to Mac owners who had two or more top case replacements.
There’s no denying that $50 million is a lot of money to pay for a faulty keyboard, but Apple’s butterfly keyboard has certainly had issues. Thousands of people were unhappy with the keyboard, experiencing issues such as sticky keys and key repeatswithout forgetting thata little dust was enough to make the key break down.
Although Apple followed up on the complaints with a repair program in June 2018, the program only covered the affected Macs for four years, and the replacement keyboard was still a butterfly keyboard – meaning many users have quickly found at the starting point. Repeated keyboard replacements were not covered and many Mac owners remained unhappywhich led to the class action lawsuit.
Ultimately, Apple tried three different methods to get the butterfly mechanism to work, but they all failed. The company took the keyboard out of circulation and started using scissor-switch keyboards, which are still in use to this day.