From The Verge’s “Angry MacBook owners get class action status for butterfly keyboard suit” posted Monday:
The suit says Apple knew its thinner keyboard was rotten.
A judge has certified a class action suit against Apple for its fragile butterfly keyboard design. The suit covers anyone who purchased an Apple MacBook with a butterfly keyboard in seven states: California, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, and Michigan. That includes people who bought a MacBook model dating between 2015 and 2017, a MacBook Pro model between 2016 and 2019, or a MacBook Air between 2018 and 2019.
The butterfly keyboard was slimmer than Apple’s previous design, which used industry-standard scissor switches. But many disgruntled MacBook users found that Apple’s revamped keyboard failed when even tiny particles of dust accumulated around the switches. That resulted in keys that felt “sticky,” failed to register keypresses, or registered multiple presses with a single hit. Apple tweaked its butterfly keyboard multiple times, but after continued complaints, it abandoned the switches in 2020.
This suit claims Apple knew for years that its butterfly switches were defective — and that its incremental changes weren’t fixing the core problem. 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.”
My take: Never write emails.
Question! Does this all come to roost with Sir Jony Ives? BTW, what is he doing these days?
It’s sad that following years of successes Ives may be remembered for one design failure.
Mac G4 Cube – a design disaster where no consideration was given for manufacturing difficulty.
The design of the Trashcan Mac Pro was so bad it wasn’t (or couldn’t be) updated for 6 years and necessitated a totally new design to replace it.
The 4th gen MacBook Pro’s (2016 to 2019) brought us the butterfly keyboard (see class action suit), the much maligned Touch-bar and only USB-C port(s) at the expense of every other port that Professionals would use.
Apple does replace them even after warranty but I wonder if other companies would have found themselves needing to do that.
‘Why do people sue Apple? Because that is where the money is!’”
Roger, no slight intended to your daughter’s, and others, more than minor inconvenience.
– I am happy to see the end of the House of Sir Jonny. Without SJ to keep a balance, I think he wielded too much power. Who is going to say no to the guy who at lunch with SJ every day. We will know for sure if / when a new Apple TV ships and what the remote looks like.
– hard to believe someone put that in writing. At some point Apple must weigh what will come out during a trial against the cost of settling. But they pretty much have to fight everything, or it would only encourage _more_ suits.
– I never have liked the lipstick/pig saying, even before it got mixed with with Sarah Palin, but the photo is funny.
Jony Ive would become upset with Steve taking too much credit as if the idea or design originated with him. True, the two were spiritual design partners who collaborated in symbiosis. It is for this reason Ives reported directly and only to Steve Jobs. Jobs is on record as saying, “… (Jony) has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me.” That all changed when Steve died and Tim Cook became CEO.
Continue…..
History has a way of judging legacies of individuals better than contemporaries. We are on the cusp of seeing history informing us that Apple needed Steve Jobs badly and that his influence within the company carries on for that reason. We are on the cusp of seeing history informing us that Jony Ive needed Apple badly and that his influence within the company while welcomed, embraced by Jobs and respected by all, is beginning to be viewed as gratuitous at best as the company carries on without him.
1) Of COURSE, Apple needed Jobs as a visionary (who happened to think that design was just as important as Engineering: there are arguments for and against this thought process).
2) Jony Ive, as a designer, was very good at developing the designs that Steve Jobs wanted – engineering be damned.
3) Some of those designs may not really have meshed with what Engineering could deliver at the time, but Steve wanted them, so Jony delivered.
4) It is unreasonable for us to assume we know better than behind closed doors how those decisions were made and who “agreed” to them.
I’m happy enough to think that Jony probably got out of that business with enough money to “get by”.
And I think that before, during, and after Jony, Apple has had some pretty cool designs. Even if, like the G4 Cube (I have one at each end of my fireplace mantle – sans hard drive) or the butterfly keyboard or antennagate, they were Engineering Challenged.
Going in to double check is a good excuse to use the beautiful handle mechanism to pull out the “reactor core”.