Do you have a MacBook with a butterfly keyboard that needed repair? Well, you may be able to claim money as part of a lawsuit settlement on behalf of the affected parties, as a California judge has now granted preliminary approval for that settlement.
Apple has had a number of controversies surrounding its hardware (often labeled 'this door' or 'that door'), and one of them was the MacBook models that worked with the failure-prone butterfly keyboard. substituted.
As Macworld discovered (opens in a new tab), Apple's €50 million settlement, originally agreed in July, distributes €33 million to MacBook Pro owners who suffered from the issue, with amounts up to €395 payable to people who have a claim. (Much of the rest of the money went to attorneys' fees, unsurprisingly.)
To be eligible as a claimant, you must have a MacBook purchased between 2015 and 2019 — a model with said butterfly keyboard, of course, and that includes the standard MacBook, MacBook Air, and most variants of the MacBook Pro. Plus, the laptop must have been purchased in the United States, in one of these states: California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Washington.
As mentioned, the maximum compensation is €395 which will be awarded to those who need to replace multiple keyboards. People who just replaced a keyboard will get €125, and for those who had to replace keys, they will be in line for a €50 payment.
Analysis: Replacing the keyboard was a thorny issue
It's good to see Apple (finally) offer compensation for this, but note that the company has not admitted to any wrongdoing in the settlement of this class action lawsuit. No doubt Apple just wants to draw a line in this episode and move on.
Part of the reason this issue was so frustrating is that replacing the keyboard was far from a trivial matter and involved removing other parts of the MacBook as well. In fact, the entire upper case of the laptop had to be replaced, that is, the chassis, the keyboard and the battery; everything.
Needless to say, it was an expensive operation, but Apple launched a Keyboard Service Program to replace all affected keyboards for free (with multiple replacements possible, and those people are the ones getting the biggest payout here, as noted). . By the way, the website of this keyboard service program (opens in a new tab) contains the full list of affected MacBook models.
The butterfly keyboard went through several revisions, but all of these keyboards remained problematic in one way or another, even though they were improvements over previous versions, so Apple eventually dropped the design as of 2020, thankfully.
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