The butterfly keyboard installed in the MacBook has been pointed out a lot since its appearance, and a class action lawsuit against Apple in 2018 occurred. The plaintiff’s suit was recognized as a class action by judges on March 19, 2021 (local time).
The butterfly keyboard, which was first installed on the MacBook in 2015, was used as a MacBook keyboard for five years until the Magic Keyboard, which adopted the scissor pentagraph method, appeared in the MacBook Pro in 2019. The butterfly keyboard is a keyboard that realizes the slimming of the MacBook and features a typing feel with less reflection. However, it has been pointed out that dust is easy to accumulate from before, and many people report malfunctions. For this reason, in May 2018, a class action lawsuit took place in California, USA, claiming that there was a problem with the Apple keyboard. Accordingly, Apple launched a keyboard repair program in June 2018.
Subsequently, as of March 19, 2021, seven cases, including the lawsuit filed in 2018, were found to be recognized as class lawsuits. The plaintiff claims that Apple has long known and neglected the butterfly keyboard flaw. Until now, butterfly keyboards have been modified several times, but not all problems have been fundamentally solved. In addition, an internal document confirmed that Apple executives said that no matter how ugly they applied pig lipstick to the butterfly keyboard, the ugly thing was unchanged, supporting the claim that it was understood as a defective product inside.
The plaintiff alleges that Apple is in violation of seven state laws, including the California Anti-Competition Act, the Florida Fraud and Unfair Trade Act, and the Michigan Consumer Protection Act. If the plaintiff wins, the owner of the MacBook in the state could get monetary compensation from Apple, but as it is still a class action lawsuit across the United States, no damage to other state users has been incurred. Meanwhile, the law firm that initiated the trial began investigating the impact of butterfly keyboards across the United States.
Apple recognized several problems with the butterfly keyboard as a problem and refuted it, but the plaintiff succeeded in being recognized by the judge that the root of the problem lies in the design of the thin keys and narrow key spacing, resulting in a class action lawsuit. . For this reason, at trial, Apple must prove that it wasn’t making a keyboard for years, knowing if the design was flawed, and that these design features weren’t the cause of the breakdown. Related information can be found here.