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Portables (Apple) The Courts Apple

Angry MacBook Owners Get Class Action Status for Butterfly Keyboard Suit (theverge.com) 61

A judge has certified a class action suit against Apple for its fragile butterfly keyboard design. From a report: The suit covers anyone who purchased an Apple MacBook with a butterfly keyboard in seven states: California, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, and Michigan. That includes people who bought a MacBook model dating between 2015 and 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 8th in California, but the order remained sealed until late last week. It raises the stakes for a suit that was first filed in 2018, three years after Apple added the controversial butterfly switches to its laptops. The butterfly keyboard was slimmer than Apple's previous design, which used industry-standard scissor switches. But many disgruntled MacBook users found that Apple's revamped keyboard failed when even tiny particles of dust accumulated around the switches. That resulted in keys that felt "sticky," failed to register keypresses, or registered multiple presses with a single hit. Apple tweaked its butterfly keyboard multiple times, but after continued complaints, it abandoned the switches in 2020.
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Angry MacBook Owners Get Class Action Status for Butterfly Keyboard Suit

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  • by nwaack ( 3482871 ) on Monday March 22, 2021 @12:43PM (#61186128)
    Everyone gets five dollars!!! Except, of course, the lawyers who will get 5 million or so. Woohoo!!
  • by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Monday March 22, 2021 @12:46PM (#61186148)

    Look, I love the Apple products I own, but that butterfly keyboard was a dud from the get-go, we all knew it, and the fact that Apple doubled-down on it by including it in three generations of laptops just goes to show how out of touch they were with the situation. Either that, or perhaps it shows just how slow it can be to turn the Apple ship in response to unanticipated problems. Regardless, I sincerely hope this will be a lesson they learn from, because they did immense damage to their credibility by continuing to include those keyboards for as long as they did.

    • Same attitude here. Gave up on Mac laptops due to the fiasco, and my primary desktop is now a Linux box. Fascinated by their failure to quickly address it, and hope they are forced to pay a material settlement to their customers.

      Their “modern” approach to warranties is abhorrent.

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Same attitude here. Gave up on Mac laptops due to the fiasco, and my primary desktop is now a Linux box. Fascinated by their failure to quickly address it, and hope they are forced to pay a material settlement to their customers.

        Their “modern” approach to warranties is abhorrent.

        Pay? No, that's the wrong answer. That's what every one of these class action lawsuits results in, and it's a useless outcome. The customer gets a tiny sum of money that pales in comparison with the hassles caused by their mistake, and they just move on to make the next design mistake.

        The only way to break that cycle is to make it really *hurt*. The class action should force Apple to provide an actual permanent fix in the form of a non-butterfly replacement top case engineered to work with the existing

        • by bored ( 40072 )

          I think a lot of the problem lies at the feet of the class action legal teams, which would rather make their tens of millions than actually help the class action members. If you were the class representative you could start with "full replacement" plus some cash for everyone's trouble and negotiate down to full replacement, but its likely this will go on for a decade/etc and apple will win because by then they will say no one is actually still using the machines, and offer everyone a coupon off their next

    • That keyboard was terrible, when new and working properly. Then got much worse as it aged.
      I gave up on their stuff and just use an older Thinkpad with Linux. (Mint) With a couple of cheep upgrades to RAM and an SSD it makes a very nice and serviceable laptop, for very little money.
  • That combined with seemingly over-priced hardware, and one really has to wonder what is the draw towards Apple?
    • Because they have such a high resale value! Oh wait, I guess without a usable keyboard they are worthless.
    • That combined with seemingly over-priced hardware, and one really has to wonder what is the draw towards Apple?

      Uh, seemingly over-priced? Which Apple price tag, has left this up for debate?

      This is a company that charges $700 for a set of wheels while the rest of us try and figure out why server wheels exist.

      • My 4/260 was on wheels. It needed them. On the plus side it had cables long enough that I could roll around the garage on it while using it...

    • The form is the draw, for the most part. They also encourage people to misidentify form as function. That aluminum case feels "sturdy" ... until it bends in your pocket. That keyboard feels "precision-engineered" ... until a piece of dust gets in it.

      Undoubtedly, they often do use good components. When they absolutely can't get away with anything less. When the average idiot would visibly notice it in the showroom. So it doesn't take much of an oversight to put it over the line. They're not overbuilding - wh

    • Status and ignorance. Those are the primary driving forces for apple buyers that I have seen. You have those that buy apple because status they believe having a apple product will convey on them. They think that the apple brand automatically makes it better even though in virtually every case the apple product is no better, and in many cases worse, what is offered else where.

      An Ignorance in they are unaware by choice, or the unwillingness to learn there are better products out there with better supp

  • The butterfly keyboard was slimmer than Apple's previous design

    Now who asked for that? Keyboards need some TRAVEL to be comfortable to use. Regular laptop keyboards are shit in the first place because they have almost no travel. Making them even thinner, with less travel, can only make things shittier.

    • The escape key has zero travel. Vi users cry.

    • Agreed. No one was asking for the travel to be reduced to that degree, and I say this as someone who actually prefers low-travel keyboards (blasphemy, I know).

      After several years of forcing myself to use a beautiful, well-built, perfect-in-every-way mechanical keyboard for 90% of my computing, I finally came to terms with the fact that I loved the idea of a traditional mechanical keyboard far more than the reality, with the key travel in particular being something I didn't like (aside: yes, I'm aware there

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        There is a correct amount of travel, for comfort. I thinks its probably less than Model M no matter what you read here, and as certainly more than Apple's butterfly board. It may very with the amount of force required as well.

        Whatever the case, I am amazed with all the negative response to not just the durability of the keyboard but also is feel, it got out the lab..

        I can't believe there were not decision makers well aware it was not a nice keyboard to use. I suspect they were banking on Apple's credibility

      • Gaming Keyboards were my salvation. I gave up on the mac wireless boards, because I wore one a year out....spent some time at a computer store in the gaming keyboard section....clicked around the floor samples till I found one I liked...entertained the millennial who had no idea what to do with the grey haired guy tapping on the keyboards who said "no, I don't game"... Gaming Keyboards and mice rock for word processing, toss the rest of the stuff.
    • Now who asked for that?

      Apple users and fans did, even if they did so without realizing it.

      You can't keep praising a company for making slimmer devices and buying their products and expect them not to try to do the same thing. If you rewarded a dog for shitting on your carpet, should you be surprised if it keeps doing exactly that?

  • Their insane obsession with thinness has got to go.
    • by Strider- ( 39683 )

      It already has. They've gone back to a better keyboard design.

  • This will continue to happen until we, as a civilization, dedicate ourselves to publicly executing any and all horrible design engineers suffering from tragic levels of frail egos and hubris.

    The fact remains that when there are no more crap engineers, we wonâ(TM)t have a crap engineering problem.

    • dedicate ourselves to publicly executing any and all horrible design engineers

      One, that seems a bit excessive. Two, there's subjectively and objectively bad approaches to engineering, and the problem with a mob is they tend to forget to stop when the latter is gone but the former still remains. Three, mistakes help us learn what firmly goes into the objectively bad group, if you ever want to ensure failure in a group, make sure the group fears failure.

      All that said, I'm no apologist for the Apple butterfly keyboard. It's a very clearly bad engineering choice. I was no Apple suppo

      • >if you ever want to ensure failure in a group, make sure the group fears failure.

        Holy shit, I need to make this my work email signature, but my boss would 100% take offense.

  • Laughs in MacBook 2015
  • ... has had some fucking problem or other that apple won't do anything about. I'm done. Was using them as a desktop most of the time anyway.
  • I had a 2017 where the keyboard failed 3 times, they swapped it for a 16" 2019 model. The keyboard really sucked, but it's not like they didn't do anything about it.
  • I had to set up a lab 2016, ordered a load of Macbook pros for everyone. All keyboards died within two years. I was so mad I swore off Macbooks, tried a Thinkpad with Debian... Boom, computing nirvana. And on this X220, typing nirvana as well.

  • Hey, I'm an angry macbook user :) The place I work for forced this thing on me. Habtic feedback on the keys is garbage and it doesn't even have proper keys for esc and F keys!
    • I've got one of the butterflies. Hands down one of the worst fucking keyboards I've typed on. I love that they made it 3 generations before giving up on it.
      I can only imagine how badly they wanted to move to zero-travel keys for the sake of its sleek body.
  • I had the exact same problem with an Acer, but no one talks about a cheap notebook. It cost me $20 from ebay and some quality time with the plastic rivets. Previous notebooks used to have a keyboard that could be inserted from above, now you have to dig through the whole machine to get it out. Not much different from a Macbook. There aren't even other designs on the market, all of them have this chiclet look.

  • Seems I bought both before and after this window.

    Is trying something before you buy it and/or reading reviews that much bother?

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