Took it to an Apple store and was quoted £700 to fix it which is equivalent to almost half the cost of the laptop. For a single key. Absolute insanity.
Just complaining about it doesn't get you very far as long as you still keep shoving money in their pocket.
These days there are plenty of quality alternatives that are not Apple and lowering their sales should send a clear message to their board.
But yes we can also strive towards both goals simultaneously. I personally will never spend any money on Apple's products. I've inherited a few of them, but I keep myself as loosely tied to the ecosystem as possible.
I always see the suggestion to vote with your wallet but how does it even work with a product with usable lifecycle of 5 or even 10 years? By the end of 2025 Apple will see a sales slowdown over the past few years. At that point I'm not sure it's even possible to pinpoint specific reasons, like "customer couldn't replace keycap on a 2017 model computer" which may or may not have been solved for years already.
If you have complaints and you want them to be fixed, tell them (https://www.apple.com/feedback/), unless you've given up completely on the company and won't ever return to it. Simply voting with your wallet is the equivalent of ghosting in commerce.
Times have changed. :(
Edit: currency is not American
Lol, why? I have expensive keyboards and they are nowhere near that much for a single key. Is there any other keyboard on the planet that has such expensive keys (except maybe that one with OLEDs on every key)?
What are they sprinkling these things with to make people parrot such tripe?
Makes sense? No. Costs more than £70? Yes.
The Apple repair confirmation email has two items listed, £290.83 for the case, £69 for repairs. It's £0.00 to pay because it's covered by Apple.
Other people in this thread are saying they have done DIY single key replacements... but maybe it was on models that weren't the butterfly keyboard?
Do I understand right that the "butterfly keyboard" is actually no longer used in the new 2020 models, it was abandoned by Apple? [1] It does seem to have been a mistake all around.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/butterfly-keyboard-vs-scisso...
I've had this happen to me, although I argued (successfully) that the keyboard was defective and I was trying to repair a stuck key (this was the previous butterfly mechanism) and they did a replacement under AppleCare.
The tech even told me that replacing keycaps on the butterfly keyboards is extremely challenging, and even they break the keys sometimes.
I ended up buying a broken keyboard from eBay for $80 and picked the keys off that I wanted, then re-sold it on eBay for $60.
(this was before they announced the keyboard replacement program)