A federal judge in California has certified an ongoing class-action suit against Apple for its fragile butterfly keyboard design, clearing another hurdle for angry customers. The suit covers people who purchased an Apple MacBook with a butterfly keyboard in seven states: California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and Washington. That covers people who bought a MacBook model dating between 2015 and 2017, a MacBook Air between 2018 and 2019, or a MacBook Pro model between 2016 and 2019.
In a ruling handed down on March 8, but made publicly available last week, Judge Edward Davila certified the case with seven subclasses for a suit that was first filed in 2018, three years after the controversial butterfly switches were added by Apple to its laptops.
Introduced in 2015, the butterfly keyboard was slimmer than Apple’s previous industry-standard scissor switches design. According to The Verge, the issue found out by disgruntled Mac customers was that the keyboard “failed when even tiny particles of dust accumulated around the switches.” That resulted in keys that felt “sticky,” they failed to register keypresses and also could not register multiple presses with a single hit. Apple made changes to its butterfly keyboard multiple times, but after continued complaints, it abandoned the switches last year.
This suit claims that the Cupertino-based tech giant knew for years that its butterfly switches were defective — and that the core problem was far from being fixed with its incremental changes. It cites internal communications inside Apple, including an executive who wrote that “no matter how much lipstick you try to put on this pig [referring to the butterfly keyboard] . . . it’s still ugly.”
The plaintiffs accuse Apple of violating several laws across the seven states mentioned above, including “California’s Unfair Competition Law, the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, and the Michigan Consumer Protection Act.” A nationwide certification at this time has not been asked for, but any US buyer of an affected MacBook has been invited to complete a survey made by the law firm behind the suit.
Apple, obviously not happy with the class action certification, argued that one consolidated suit shouldn’t cover multiple tweaks to the butterfly keyboard. But the plaintiffs successfully countered that argument stating that all butterfly keyboards may have the same fundamental problems due to their “shallow design” and “narrow gaps” between keys. “None of the design differences that Apple points to changed the tight spaces between the keys, nor the low-travel aspect of the design,” the order reads. On a later date, Apple will have to argue that these basic features didn’t actually make the design unreliable — and that it did not knowingly make defective keyboards for all these years.
