Apple is facing a class action lawsuit in the US over its fragile butterfly keyboard design on the MacBook computers.
A judge has certified a case with seven subclasses, covering any consumer who purchased an Apple MacBook with the thin butterfly mechanism on the keyboard in the states of California, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington and Michigan.
It includes people who bought the MacBook model between 2015 and 2017, MacBook Pro models between 2016 and 2019 or a MacBook Air between 2018 and 2019.
The suit was originally filed in 2018, three years after Apple added the controversial butterfly switches to its laptops.
The butterfly keyboard was designed to be much slimmer then Apple’s previous keyboard, however users angrily complained the mechanism allowed for even tiny particles of dust or crumbs to be accumulated around the keys, jamming them easily.
This resulted in ‘sticky’ keys which were unable to respond to keypresses.
The class action suit alleges Apple knew the butterfly keyboards were defective for years and failed to address the issue.
It cites internal communications within Apple about the keyboard, with one executive reportedly writing: “no matter how much lipstick you try to put on this pig… it’s still ugly”.
Apple has argued against the suit’s class action certification and claims the consolidated suit shouldn’t cover multiple tweaks made to the butterfly keyboard.
Apple has ditched the controversial keyboard used in its MacBooks since 2015. In 2019, it moved to a new scissor-switch design which will use fibreglass to reinforce its keys.
