A judge ratified a class action lawsuit against Apple for its fragile butterfly-shaped keyboard design. The suit covers anyone who has purchased an Apple MacBook with a butterfly keyboard in seven states: California, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington and Michigan. This includes people who purchased a MacBook model dated 2015 to 2017, a MacBook Pro model between 2016 and 2019 or a MacBook Air between 2018 and 2019.
Judge Edward Davila certified the case with seven subclasses on March 8 in California, but the order remained sealed until the end of last week. This raises the stakes for a lawsuit that was first opened in 2018, three years after Apple added the controversial butterfly keys to its laptops.
The butterfly keyboard was thinner than Apple’s previous design, which used industry-standard scissor keys. But many dissatisfied MacBook users have found that Apple’s revamped keyboard failed when even small dust particles accumulated around the switches. This resulted in keys that looked “sticky”, did not register keystrokes or registered multiple presses with a single touch. Apple has adjusted its butterfly keyboard several times, but after constant complaints, it abandoned the keys in 2020.
This lawsuit claims that Apple had known for years that its butterfly switches were defective – and that its incremental changes were not solving the main problem. He cites internal communications within Apple, including an executive who wrote that “no matter how much lipstick you try to put on this pig [referring to the butterfly keyboard] . . . it’s still ugly. “
The plaintiffs accuse Apple of violating several laws in the seven states mentioned above, including the California Unfair Competition Act, the Florida Unfair and Misleading Business Practices Act and the Michigan Consumer Protection Act. They are not asking for national certification at the moment, but the law firm behind the process has invited any American buyer of an affected MacBook to complete a survey.
Apple argued against class action certification, saying that a consolidated lawsuit should not cover multiple adjustments to the butterfly keyboard. But the plaintiffs have successfully argued that all butterfly keyboards can have the same fundamental problems due to their shallow design and narrow spaces between keys. “None of the design differences that Apple points out changed the tight spaces between the keys, nor the low-stroke aspect of the design,” says the order. Apple will have to argue later that these basic features did not make the design unreliable – and that it has not spent years making defective keyboards.