Apple's Expensive Mistake: $50M Settlement Cleared For MacBook's Keyboard Fiasco

Apple Inc.’s AAPL MacBook users who suffered from the highly unreliable and break-prone butterfly keyboard design can finally relax as a $50 million settlement has been cleared. 

What Happened: Apple’s butterfly keyboard design, known for its unreliability and tendency to break, has led to a $50 million settlement approved by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California, reported Reuters.  

Affected customers will now have the opportunity to receive compensation ranging between $50 to $395 from the Cupertino, California-based tech giant. 

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The class-action settlement faced challenges from certain groups, but the court ultimately deemed it “fair, adequate and reasonable.”

In his order, the judge wrote, “The possibility that a better settlement may have been reached — or that the benefits provided under the settlement will not make class members’ whole’ — are insufficient grounds to deny approval.” 

The court also granted the plaintiff’s lawyer’s request for $15 million in legal fees as part of the approved settlement. 

Why It’s Important: Apple’s butterfly keyboard design is one of the most significant technological failures in recent decades, characterized by its unreliability and susceptibility to breaking. 

Introduced in 2015 as a revised keyboard design for MacBooks, it quickly gained notoriety for its poor performance and frequent malfunctions. 

The butterfly mechanism, intended to provide a sleeker, more streamlined keyboard experience, became synonymous with frustration and inconvenience for countless MacBook users. 

The problematic keyboard design remained a prominent issue until late 2019, when Apple finally transitioned to a more conventional and reliable scissor-switch keyboard mechanism in its newer MacBook models.

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