Apple Reaches $50 Million Settlement Over Defective MacBook Keyboards (reuters.com) 44
Apple agreed to pay $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit by customers who claimed it knew and concealed that the "butterfly" keyboards on its MacBook laptop computers were prone to failure. From a report: The proposed preliminary settlement was filed late Monday night in the federal court in San Jose, California, and requires a judge's approval. Customers claimed that MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro keyboards suffered from sticky and unresponsive keys, and that tiny amounts of dust or debris could make it difficult to type.
They also said Apple's service program was inadequate because the Cupertino, California-based company often provided replacement keyboards with the same problems. The settlement covers customers who bought MacBook, MacBook Air and most MacBook Pro models between 2015 and 2019 in seven U.S. states: California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Washington.
They also said Apple's service program was inadequate because the Cupertino, California-based company often provided replacement keyboards with the same problems. The settlement covers customers who bought MacBook, MacBook Air and most MacBook Pro models between 2015 and 2019 in seven U.S. states: California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Washington.
Thanks Jony! (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks for that great keyboard design!
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I don't get why Jony gets blamed for that. If you look at their butterfly keyboard patents his name is not even there. https://patentscope.wipo.int/s... [wipo.int]
Re:Thanks Jony! (Score:4, Informative)
If you're in charge of Design and you ship a shit design, you get the blame.
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If in your career you never made a mistake that caused a lot of problems, either
1. You never been promoted to a level where you can make major decisions
2. Never worked on a project of any complexity
3. Had made plenty of mistakes but your Ego is preventing you from admitting it to yourself.
Ives, Jobs, Musk, Holzhausen... Are/Were humans who do make mistakes and not all their decisions were good ones.
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Re: Thanks Jony! (Score:2)
If in your career you never made a mistake that caused a lot of problems, either...
Designing an unreliable keyboard is one mistake. Not having processes in place to stop it from shipping is another. Not realizing the overwhelming number of defective units indicates a problem is another. Not immediatley compensating your costomers for your mistake is another. Going to court and fighting what a 3rd party objectively identifies as your mistake is another. I'm sure the list could go on. Of course it's highly doubtful these were all actually mistakes and not deliberate attempts to cover
I will never buy another Apple laptop. (Score:2)
Re:I will never buy another Apple laptop. (Score:4, Insightful)
First one, no foul
Second one, getting a bit sketchy
Third one, it's all on you
Fourth one, it's simple masochism
I envy Mac owners as I type this on my Dell XPS... (Score:3, Insightful)
I envy Mac owners as I type this on my Dell XPS with Windows 11. It can't sleep and wake up reliably, and only has about 4 hours of battery life. It stands at the confluence of Microsoft's modern sleep and Intel's latest tech and it is a ****show. The XPS 11th gen predecessor couldn't sleep at all - everyone turned on hibernate. The 12th gen doesn't have BIOS support for the old sleep. So, before you get too angry with Apple, please remember the bar set by their competition is really, re
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1. Their volume, coupled with the very limited number of variants makes each unit able to carry a heavy, heavy R&D tag while still being profitable.
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I bought an el cheapo HP Ryzen 3 laptop (it has like 3 gpu cores, which is painful, but it has plenty of CPU for $300) and out of the box it ran Windows 10 and the video driver crashed the machine (Free reboots! Yay!) But then I put Mint on it and it's been flawless since except for the NIC. And even that seems to have been addressed, it was having connection problems every few days that I fixed with reboots.
I had more trouble with Linux on my FX8350/990FX desktop, which has nvidia graphics. I had to twiddl
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At what point does the customer take responsibility for not doing due diligence? I am not saying Apple shouldn't be held responsible, but then why does the consumer always get off too? I see fools complaining about the lack of ports on the Macbook but buying one anyway. The butterfly keyboard was a new feature, it obviously had some risk to it. Anything new has a risk to it. That should be obvious. When automobiles and airplanes were new, they had a lot of crashes/failures.
If you don't like Apple, don't buy
Re: I will never buy another Apple laptop. (Score:3)
The problem is the repeated attempts to iterate on a bad design. There comes a point where you realise a bad design can't be fixed. It had the noise a mechanical keyboard, none of the travel or tactile feel, and would break if an atom got stuck under a key.
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At what point does the customer take responsibility for not doing due diligence? I am not saying Apple shouldn't be held responsible, but then why does the consumer always get off too? I see fools complaining about the lack of ports on the Macbook but buying one anyway.
Fast and Famous cars, brand-name jets, and other destructive toys have killed more than spelling, and yet consumers continue to fly and buy. It's going to take a hell of a lot of failure for people to stop buying their favorite brand.
The butterfly keyboard was a new feature, it obviously had some risk to it. Anything new has a risk to it. That should be obvious. When automobiles and airplanes were new, they had a lot of crashes/failures.
Ironically it's not even shocking anymore as to just how many innocent people have to die before regulators finally step in and force the manufacturer to admit fault and recall a car. Or ground a plane. Wonder who should be blamed for that risk-addled design in a Democracy
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I stopped after two lapatops. Lesson learned. Both had hardware problems early on. Sure they'll cover stuff under warranty, but they shouldn't have that much stuff fail to begin with. Their laptop quality control is terrible for such a premium price. As a company, they are unfriendly at best, or actively hostile towards people who want to repair their own devices.
Ever will there be the apologist that sneers and says bad hardware is (somehow) not Apple's fault, and there's nothing difficult about working on
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It's not just their Macbooks too. Remember, iPhones?
So keyboards were only failing in 7 states? (Score:3)
I mean, seriously -- this is what's wrong with all of these class action settlements. They get the participants a few bucks to compensate them for their hassles, but it doesn't ever really push the company that caused the issue to do anything useful about it. (I suspect it does the opposite, really, since they can say "We already paid out millions in a settlement to resolve that!")
Meanwhile, I have a friend who lives in Missouri who suffered from this problem and she received nothing. My friends in Maryland who had this problem repeatedly also get nothing.
What would make more sense, really, is a law requiring all companies with product recalls to replace the defective part(s) with revised/improved ones; not just the same part with the original defect. I'm pretty sure that's how safety recalls already work. (The automotive industry isn't replacing defective airbags with identically flawed new ones.) It should be extended to everything though, since owning a product with a known defective design reduces its resale value and risks it breaking outside the coverage period to get the manufacture to swap it for you at no cost.
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Automobile safety defects get a special treatment from the US government that forces manufacturers to act outside of warranty provisions. I think that for most consumer goods, a lack of reliability outside of a warranty period doesn't get the same kind of treatment. The standard remedy is to not buy one of those products, or similar products, from that manufacturer again. For example, I bought a Rabbit corkscrew once... it was a great corkscrew, but it eventually failed in two ways: the handle material b
You might be over-thinking my suggestion? (Score:2)
The fact is, all of those questions you ask are ones every company probably asks before deciding they need to issue a recall, already.
I think realistically, if they know a product is suffering a failure due to a specific component that's got a defect, they should replace ALL of those that people bring to them for service. Over time, the product is going to become obsolete and fewer and fewer people will care about having it serviced, anyway. And as the product reaches its expected end of life, OTHER items s
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No, it's what's right with all these class action suits.
The framework exists to protect the corporations. One can wish it were otherwise but all evidence points in only one direction, so wishing only confuses us.
The US forbids marketable torts which is an actual way for the people to collectively fight the big powers.
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What would really help is if you voted representatives into government who will make your state more consumer friendly, as opposed to favoring corporations above everything else and treating them like god's solution to humanity's problems.
$50 won't even cover the actual damages (Score:3)
That $50 won't even cover the cost of the *two* generic third-party replacement key cap sets I had to buy because the same keys fail more than once (by frequency of use). These keyboards are junk, and we need stronger consumer protection laws if Apple can get off so lightly for such a colossal hardware design failure.
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SO, are you going to buy another Apple product or actually speak with your wallet and go with some other brand?
What other brand? 99% of the software I use won't run in Linux, and Windows is such an abomination that it makes me want to kill myself after less than an hour. (I have a Tricaster that's built on Windows. I put up with it there because I have no choice. But there's no way I would ever put up with such a horrid train wreck for my main computer. I mean, even simple, common actions like changing the IP address of a NIC requires you to click an interface, click "properties", find one line in a long list t
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That hasn't been how you change your IP address in Windows since Windows 7.
Start -> Settings -> Network -> Properties (your current default route NIC is selected by default, but you can pick another if you want) -> Edit -> Select "Manual" from the dropdown box in the popup to override DHCP -> Hit the button to enable manual configuration of IPv4, IPv6, or both -> Enter your IP data. Closing it out involves clicking "save" and then closing the Settings window.
Compare this to a mac, where
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That hasn't been how you change your IP address in Windows since Windows 7.
I'm describing the experience I had on the Tricaster Mini 4K, which runs Windows 10. It takes nine steps on Windows according to this [tp-link.com], and that's the UI that I experienced. It might also be relevant to note that the machine has 6 NICs.
I don't know. Maybe there are easier ways. The problem, from my perspective, is that Microsoft has repeatedly tried to put some user-friendly skins on their OS to make common tasks easier for end users, but each time they do that, they leave behind A. previous skins as det
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If I want to change my default NIC from an IP ending in .11 to .15, all I have to do is type:
Powershell
Set-NetIPAddress -InterfaceIndex 4 -IPAddress 10.0.0.15
Granted, you have to want to do something often enough to either remember the CLI command, or save the steps as a PS script. If you don't do something very often, well, that's what the GUI is for. You didn't complain you couldn't find the option, just how many steps it took. Knowing the PS command fixes that at the expense of some res
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SO, are you going to buy another Apple product or actually speak with your wallet and go with some other brand?
SO, are you going to have this same flippant attitude about such a problem when it's consumer lives being taken instead of just annoying misspellings due to shitty keeyboard ddesign?
Just curious as the world continues to collapse into a world full of not-a-monopoly mega-corps who are all Too Big To Lose in court.
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Re: $50 won't even cover the actual damages (Score:1)
I had exactly 2 systems with a problem over the years out of approximately 100 devices I manage. In both cases Apple replaced the keyboard and in one case even repaired the user damaged display (crack on bottom right so only showed discoloration) for free.
Apple has excellent warranty replacement, especially in comparison with Dell and the like.
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Last time my Windows laptop keyboard failed I went online and had a choice of 4 models to choose from: Normal, chiclet, backlit chiclet, and industrial/ruggedized rubber membrane. I went for backlit chiclet, just like the previous one.
The old one came out with 4 screws, the new one popped right in.
I bought the laptop second hand for about $400. I upgraded to SSD and a battery swap is a few minutes work if it ever needs one. Batteries are easy to get online, too.
I admit I quite like the idea of Apple's high
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I had exactly 2 systems with a problem over the years out of approximately 100 devices I manage. In both cases Apple replaced the keyboard and in one case even repaired the user damaged display (crack on bottom right so only showed discoloration) for free.
That likely means that your employer stops using computers sooner than average. Out of my two Touch Bar 15" MacBook Pro computers (my work machine and my personal machine), I lost five or more key caps on both of them (read "the keys fell off"). Both had problems with keys sticking that were far worse than any machine I've ever owned, and unlike previous machines (where you could just press and make a circular rocking motion to break up the crumb or whatever and it would be fine from then on), the problem
$35 Million settlement. (Score:2)
I really like this keyboard (Score:3)
Not sure what caused the failure. I've used it in all kind of nasty environments, no failure, and man I really like typing on it. Very crisp, responsive, and *fast* feel. Improved my wpm by like 10.
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HOWEVER, it just takes until one of those f'ers stops responding because it gets stuck. Guitar picks, fingernails, carefully with a knife - just try popping up the key a bit and hit-hit-hit-hit-hit usually gets it working again. Not always, but usually.
I, for one, will not be
Barely a Fine (Score:2)
In another metric, that's like... what, 20 Mac Pros?
The lawyers get $15 mill. I get... (Score:2)
about 37 cents? just a guess.