Malfunctioning keyboards in MacBooks are still a problem. A class action lawsuit is targeting Apple

At the moment, all indications are that the days of the much-hated Butterfly keyboard are coming to an end. It first appeared in 2015 in the 12″ MacBook, and it can be expected that both 13″ (or 14″) MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs will switch to its successor within the next year. However, Apple will probably feel the reverberations of this five-year era for a long time to come, as a class-action lawsuit was greenlit in the US precisely because of faulty keyboards.

In this lawsuit, the injured users accuse Apple of having known about the defects of the then-new Butterfly keyboard since 2015, but continued to offer products with it and tried to cover up the problems. Apple tried to nip the lawsuit in the bud, but the motion to dismiss the lawsuit was thrown off the table by a federal court.

The victims also complain in the lawsuit that Apple's remedy in the form of a recall does not actually solve anything, it only pushes the potential problem further. The keyboards replaced as part of the recall are identical to the ones being replaced, so it's only a matter of time before they start to go bad too.

A San Jose Circuit Court judge said Apple must face charges because the MacBook keyboard repair program is inadequate and does nothing to address the keyboard situation. Based on this, there should be compensation for the injured, who sometimes had to deal with the situation at their own expense before Apple launched its own recall.

Both owners of the original 12″ MacBook from 2015, which had the first generation of this problematic keyboard, as well as owners of MacBook Pros from 2016 and older, could join the class action lawsuit.

Over the years, Apple tried several times to improve the mechanism of Butterfly keyboards, in total there were four iterations of this mechanism, but the problems were never completely eliminated. That's why Apple implemented an "old-fashioned" keyboard in the new 16" MacBook Pros, which uses the original but at the same time updated mechanism from MacBooks before 2015. It is this one that should appear in the rest of the MacBook range next year.

Source: Macrumors