Eligible MacBook owners have started to receive payments relating to Apple's butterfly keyboard mechanism class action lawsuit in the U.S. 9to5Mac editor Michael Burkhardt said he received two $395 checks in the mail on Saturday. Burkhardt and others who have been affected by butterfly keyboard issues have endured very long waits for their payouts, as the suit was filed back in 2018.
Apple introduced its underlying butterfly keyboard mechanism starting 2015, touting it as an improvement on traditional scissor switches on laptops. Key benefits (apologies for the pun) were supposed to include greater key stability, precision, quietness, and user comfort. Sadly, as the tech rolled out to more laptops in subsequent years, issues with its reliability and durability became ever clearer with the buying public.
Rather than the mechanism being inherently at fault, its issue was that small amounts of dust or debris could seriously disrupt the keyswitch operation - and who lives in an environment without dust? Thus Apple refined and tweaked the butterfly design multiple times, but it couldn't protect the mechanism from ingress thoroughly enough. It threw in the towel and went back to scissor switches on new laptops starting in late 2019.
User trials and tribulations with the butterfly mechanism became quite a hot topic in the later 2010s. Apple finally admitted there was a design problem in 2018. Around the same time, several class-action lawsuits related to the butterfly mechanism were filed. Only now are affected users starting to see payouts from this legal action.
These first reported payments have arrived as part of a no-fault $50 million settlement in 2022, from a class action filed in 2018. The payouts you could claim for your keyboard troubles were as follows:
- Up to $395 for 2 or more top case replacements
- Up to $125 for 1 top case replacement
- Up to $50 for keycap replacements
Please note that you would not just get these payments automatically. Only those who filed a claim form for their 2015 to 2019 MacBook woes would qualify (applications were open from May 2023, but deadlines have all now passed). Moreover, the class action only covered residents in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Washington. 9to5Mac editor Michael Burkhardt obviously claimed for two affected laptops he had the misfortune of purchasing, with each requiring a full top case replacement during their service life.
