iFixit Teardown Reveals Silicone Dust Covers in 2018 MacBook Pro Keyboard

Apple released its new 2018 MacBook Pros the other day, touting performance increases and a redesigned keyboard. It appears that the company also secretly fixed the defective keyboards on the new laptops as well.

A new teardown from iFixit has revealed a thin silicon layer underneath each key that might help keep dust from getting lodged inside the third-generation butterfly switch and rendering it unusable.

As you can see in the photo above, each key on the new MacBook Pro keyboard comes with a thin silicone cover, which “cocoons” the butterfly switch. iFixit also created a video to highlight how this cover works:

Apple told reporters that the only improvement made to the third-generation butterfly switch keyboard is that the keys are now quieter to type on. However, iFixit suggests that this is just a cover-up which was really intended to fix the keyboard’s reliability.

Apple is facing several class-action lawsuits for the failure of their first and second-generation MacBook Pro keyboards. Customers have been experiencing issues with sticky, unresponsive, or repeating keys, which prompted Apple to launch a free repair program for those machines.