A California federal judge has cut out claims for an injunction, restitution and other equitable relief from a proposed class action alleging Apple Inc. sold laptops with defective keyboards, finding the consumers failed to show money damages wouldn’t make them whole, according to Law360 (a subscription is required to read the entire article).
The lawsuit — filed in the Northern District of California —claims that said it knew and concealed how the “butterfly” keyboards on its Mac laptops were prone to failure. According to the lawsuit, users started experiencing problems with the butterfly style keyboards in MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops not long after the 2015 models were introduced. Despite this, the lawsuit claims, Apple kept not only selling the laptops with the same keyboards, but charged a premium price for them.
“The MacBook suffers from a latent defect,” the plaintiffs stated in their complaint. “As numerous online complaints describe, not long after consumers purchase the MacBook, their keyboard begins to suffer from a host of problems including keys sticking, keystrokes failing to register, keys typing a letter or command multiple times even though [the key] was struck only once, and keys simply not working at all.”
Apple offers a one-year warranty on the MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. The company also has an online support page that offers cleaning instructions for the keyboard.
The lawsuit, however, claims that these measures are insufficient to prevent or fix the problem. Rather, the lawsuit alleges that Apple “routinely refuses to honor its warranty obligations,” instead telling MacBook owners “to try self-help remedies that it knows will not result in a permanent repair.”
The complaint seeks $5 million in damages under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. It also seeks certification of a class of MacBook and MacBook Pro purchasers with affected devices.
Apple debuted its “butterfly” keyswitch design in the 12-inch MacBook before incorporating an improved second-generation version in 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pros. The 16-inch MacBook Pro has a designed “scissor switch” keyboard designed to be more reliable. The keyboard is expected to debut on other Mac laptops in 2020.
