Juli Clover:
Apple will pay $50 million to settle a 2018 class-action lawsuit over the faulty butterfly keyboards that were used in MacBook machines between 2015 and 2019, reports Reuters.
[…]
The lawsuit covers only customers in the above-mentioned states, and lawyers are expecting maximum payouts of $395 to customers who replaced multiple keyboards, $125 to people who replaced one keyboard, and $50 to people who replaced key caps. The settlement is preliminary and will need to be approved by the judge overseeing the case.
Nick Heer:
One of the particularly frustrating aspects of this lawsuit is the degree of redaction in documents and transcripts. There are filings where entire pages are effectively eliminated. That is not unusual, of course, but it is irritating for those of us who want to understand what happened with these keyboards. When the components that were changed between different models are treated as a corporate secret, it is unlikely we may ever know when Apple first found problems and why it took so long to fix them.
Previously:
Update (2022-07-25): Joe Rossignol:
The settlement still needs to receive final court approval. In the meantime, here is everything to know about the agreement as currently proposed.
Update (2022-11-30): Nick Heer:
I am writing this in part to once again express my dismay that this suit was settled before substantial information was made public about this keyboard’s development and failure rate.
Update (2022-12-16): Juli Clover:
Back in July, Apple agreed to pay $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over the faulty butterfly keyboards that were used in MacBook machines between 2015 and 2019, and now emails about the settlement are going out to MacBook Pro owners eligible for a payment.
Update (2023-01-06): I received my notice of the settlement, which includes:
A Settlement has been reached with Apple Inc. (“Apple”) in a class action lawsuit alleging that the “butterfly” keyboard mechanism in certain MacBook laptops is defective, and can result in characters repeating unexpectedly; letters or characters not appearing; and/or the keys feeling “sticky” or not responding in a consistent manner.
Apple denies all of the allegations made in the lawsuit, denies that any MacBooks are defective, and denies that Apple did anything improper or unlawful. The proposed Settlement is not an admission of guilt or wrongdoing of any kind by Apple.
Update (2023-05-29): Nick Heer:
I am still irritated this lawsuit was settled before substantive information was publicly disclosed. Perhaps the similar Canadian class action will help explain how these keyboards were developed and then stayed on the market for so long.
Update (2024-07-03): Juli Clover:
Two years after Apple paid $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over faulty MacBook butterfly keyboards, funds from the settlement will be going out to affected customers.
[…]
MacBook owners who had at least two topcase replacements from Apple within four years of purchase are set to receive a maximum of $395, while customers who had one topcase repair will receive up to $125. Those who had keycap replacements are eligible for up to $50.
The first affected Macs were sold more than 9 years ago.
Update (2024-08-09): Tim Hardwick (Hacker News):
Apple customers who were affected by Apple’s flawed MacBook butterfly keyboard design have begun receiving settlement funds, two years after Apple paid $50 million to settle a class action lawsuit.
Apple Keyboard Lawsuit Legal Mac MacBook Air MacBook Pro
June Bash:
didDelete?(deleteItem(Item()))
[…]
This was surprising to me because i was thinking the order of operations would be:
- Evaluate function parameters
- Pass parameter into function if available
But instead it acts more like an @autoclosure.
It’s also confusing to me because in Objective-C the arguments are evaluated when the receiver is nil.
Dimitri Racordon:
print(whole.describe(whole.insert("Bar")))
John McCall:
Swift uses a strict left-to-right evaluation order in most situations. In this case, that causes the value of whole to be copied before the other arguments to describe are evaluated
As with the first example, splitting the code into multiple lines changes the behavior.
We’ve considered changing the evaluation of this so that self is not evaluated by copy but instead by immutable borrow, which in this case would cause this code to not compile due to an exclusivity error when the variable is modified while being immutably borrowed.
Previously:
Update (2022-08-29): See also: Slava Pestov.
Language Design Objective-C Programming Swift Programming Language
Andrew Cunningham:
The end result is a spreadsheet full of dozens of Macs, with multiple metrics for determining how long each one received official software support from Apple.
[…]
For all Mac models tracked, the average Mac receives almost exactly seven years of new macOS updates from the time it is introduced, plus another two years of security-only updates that fix vulnerabilities but don’t add new features.
[…]
Macs that are sold for an abnormally long time—the 2014 Mac mini that was available until 2018, the 2013 Mac Pro that was available until 2019, or the 2015 MacBook Air that was available until 2019, to pick three examples that Ventura doesn’t support—don’t get software updates for longer just because Apple sold them for longer. This differs from the timeline Apple uses to provide hardware repair services, which is determined based on “when Apple last distributed the product for sale.”
[…]
This has led to a gradual decline in the amount of time that Macs could expect to get new macOS releases, but the amount of software support was well within the normal historical range for Macs released in 2014 and 2015. Ventura changes that for Macs released in 2016, in particular. Those models are getting new macOS updates for less than six years from their release date, the least since 2006 and a year or two less than Mac owners could expect in the very recent past. It’s not a historical low, but it’s a noticeable step backward.
[…]
It’s also worth stressing that while there are at least mildly compelling reasons for dropping support for older 4th- and 5th-gen Intel CPUs in Ventura, as best we can tell, those reasons don’t really extend to most of the Skylake-based Macs.
Paul Haddad:
I’d probably be more OK with the situation if the OS releases were actually adding significant new features or if Apple wasn’t making supporting old releases harder than it should be.
Previously:
History Mac
CYME:
Opening Peakto is like opening all your catalogs at once and seeing all your images in ONE app. No matter what editing software you use. Peakto is the control tower that regroups your catalogs from Apple Photos, Aperture, Lightroom Classic, Luminar AI/Neo, Capture One, iView Media–and from your folders. Without creating extra copies of your images.
[…]
Panorama, a new feature introduced in Peakto, puts the power of AI at your service. Thanks to image recognition, Panorama categorizes all your photos, whatever their format or location, and gives you a smart overview without modifying the arrangement of your catalogs.
[…]
In Peakto we introduce Instants. Instants will gather under one roof all the master files and all the modified versions of an original shot. Instants act like a magic wand, allowing you to find all versions of a shot and bring them together instantly, while giving you invaluable insight on the story of your edits.
It’s $189 or $99/year. You have to pay before you can download the trial:
Statistics show that 95% of software downloads do not result in actual use.
At almost 700Mb per download that’s a lot of energy cost for the planet….
That’s why Peakto is not available as a free download.
Previously:
Update (2022-10-18): There is now a free trial, available either by filling out a form to get a download link or via the Mac App Store. The App Store version is 120 MB but needs to download 650 MB at launch before you can use the app. The app can then be updated without having to redownload the ML model.
Artificial Intelligence Mac Mac App macOS 12 Monterey Peakto Photography
