After a fair amount of hemming and hawing, Apple has officially acknowledged that there are problems with its “butterfly” mechanism built into the keyboards of the recent MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks. The company is now offering an extended keyboard service program for computers affected by the issue.
The extended warranty covers replacement of one or more keys or the whole keyboard, depending on the extent of users’ problems, and it covers eligible laptops up to four years after the computer was bought at retail. Each MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook equipped with the keyboard seems to be included. The four year warranty is dramatically longer than the limited warranty the computers ship with or even Apple’s extended AppleCare Plus.
Per Apple’s service page, the warranty program covers the following issues:
– Letters or characters repeat unexpectedly
– Letters or characters do not appear
– Key(s) feel “sticky” or do not respond in a consistent manner
A steadily rising number of complaints has surfaced from users regarding the keyboard in the past weeks and months, some users stating that the keyboards tend to fail entirely when encountering dust and the fragile design makes them difficult to repair.
While this has taken some time to address, it looks like Apple is taking some decent steps towards fixing the larger issue at hand.
If you’ve seen this issue on your end, please let us know about it in the comments.