After almost a year after having entered into an agreement with the North American justice, the final decision has been taken: Apple will have to pay U$$ 50 million in compensation to consumers who complained about the malfunction of keyboards with butterfly keys of their MacBooks.
After definitively rejecting the challenges to the filed class action claims, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila of San Jose, California, United States, ruled that Apple should pay damages. According to Davila, the agreement is “fair, adequate and reasonable”.
“While not all those allegedly injured receive compensation, the settlement benefits a significant number of individuals,” Davila added to Reuters.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit – who number 86,000 people – will individually receive between US$50 and US$395 as compensation for repair costs. The MacBook (2015-2017), MacBook Pro (2016-2019) and MacBook Air (2018-2019) models have the mechanism, and are the ones that entered the argument for contestation.
Introduced in 2015 with the 12-inch MacBook, the butterfly keyboard easily collected dust under the keys, causing freezes or not allowing normal typing.
Since its launch, Apple has faced several collective actions in the US court, until, after a while, it decided to replace the faulty mechanism with the scissor keyboard, which already equipped MacBooks previously.
