It"s been a long road for many owners of older MacBooks, but now that road is at an end. This weekend, it was reported that settlement checks sent by Apple for faulty butterfly keyboards in some previous MacBooks have reached the people who joined a class action lawsuit against the company years ago.
One of the writers for 9to5Mac.com reports that he has personally received checks in the mail for the settlement. It may take a little while for all of the people who requested physical checks to get their settlement payment from the postal service. The story says there"s no word yet on when people who decided to get a digital settlement payment will get their money.
This is the end of a story that began in 2015 when Apple started shipping some MacBook notebooks with butterfly mechanisms in their keyboards. This design was supposed to offer keyboards that not only worked better than normal ones on notebooks but were also up to 34 percent thinner.
However, the butterfly mechanism design did not work as advertised. Users complained of various issues with these MacBook keyboards, including sticky keys. Many had to replace the keyboards on their MacBooks a number of times. In 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Apple over these issues.
In 2019, Apple announced it would replace the butterfly keyboards on several MacBook models released in 2015-2019 for free. However, the class action lawsuit continued to make its way through the courts. In 2022, Apple agreed to pay out $50 million to settle the lawsuit.
The bad news is that only people who live in seven states in the US (California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Washington) will be able to get the settlement money. If people in those states had to replace the included MacBook keyboard two or more times, they would get $395. One-time keyboard replacements will get $125, and if you just had a keycap replaced, you will get a $50 check if you live in the supported states.