It's just incomprehensible (and an unfortunate indictment of Jony Ive's design leadership) that the 2016 MacBook Pro has continued to prove such a regression from the 2012 design. Professionals demand good design: tools that meet our needs in efficient, reliable, and even elegant ways. Apple's line of professional laptops has traditionally delivered this by and large, but the problem with the 2016 platform is that va…
> (and an unfortunate indictment of Jony Ive's design leadership)
Ive has been leading design at Apple for 26 years. I think the failure lies elsewhere.
Concur. I liked the new keyboard when it worked. But after two week-long service appointments to deal with dead keys, I've given up on it. Those laptops are defective. I'm using a 2015 15" for now.
This is the hard part - it’s supposedly a pro machine, yet they expect you to not work for a week while they repair the keyboard that fails by a single speck of dust.
My plan is to wait until there's a new model out, and then take it in for AppleCare warranty repairs once a month until I hit their lemon limit and they give me a new machine. The durability of this keyboard is a joke. I even bought one of those rubber keyboard condoms that makes the keyboard suck to type on and the H key still got dust under it somehow and started typing hh.
Apple doesn't seem to have an official lemon limit but they replaced the top-case 5 times on my 2016 and then gave me a 2017 with the same specs (slightly faster processor), and it's already crapped out already although this time they managed to replace the key and fix it.
You’re right that there’s no official “lemon limit”, but hey do have a process for it - it’s called ‘CRU’ (Customer Replacement Unit). It’s unlikely that they’ll offer it unprompted, but really after three repairs I find it difficult they would deny your request to have the laptop replaced.
It does require approval by a manager/“Lead Genius”, but you can get there by being reasonable.
Louis Rossmann has examined these issues in detail on his electronics repair YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KuVvb9DTaU (I disagree with the level of his vitriol against Apple, but I appreciate his deep teardowns and clear explanations. He just doesn't seem to understand how valuable the Apple software is vs. Windows to those who need or appreciate osx.)
>> (I disagree with the level of his vitriol against Apple, but I appreciate his deep teardowns and clear explanations. He just doesn't seem to understand how valuable the Apple software is vs. Windows to those who need or appreciate osx.) IIRC, he said in one of his videos that he's a basically Windows guy who repairs Apple products because that's where the money is. Because his channel is on YouTube, it's quite pos…
As someone who has torn down and rebuilt a thinkpad or two, I was appalled when I started looking into his and other videos on MBP repair since I've never owned a MBP. They're clearly designed with entirely different priorities; form over function has been pushed way too far thus sacrificing durability and serviceability. I guess that is okay with some people, but given the cost of the machine, I think its ridiculous. Apple can, and should, do better than this.
Apple (among others) posts are automatically “downmodded”. They require a much higher score to remain on the front page
Are you suggesting that Apple have automated bots attempt to censor hacker news? or is this more of an official thing where any posts regarding Apple are weighted down due to being considered too mainstream? or is it just a sensitive topic to many people? I can easily imagine any but I don't know which is more likely.
No, it’s a Hacker News ‘feautre’. There are a number of topics/keywords that analysis found were being automatically weighted down for, I guess, generally being low quality and spammy, or rarely leading to useful discussions. I guess the intent is that the proper and good posts should “work harder” to push up through the weight.
I tried searching for some links to cooborate it, but I wasn’t able to find anything quickly on my phone.
Tangential rant ahead: I've been pretty disappointed in the latest MacBooks as well (mostly just the keyboard and mediocre performance improvements over previous generations), so as a hedge I thought I should give Linux another try, hoping in the ~5 years since I last attempted it one of the more user-friendly distributions would have figured out how to make installation painless. Nope. It's easy enough to get a basi…
Sounds like you used a random laptop instead of researching which one is well supported hardware.
Concur. I liked the new keyboard when it worked. But after two week-long service appointments to deal with dead keys, I've given up on it. Those laptops are defective. I'm using a 2015 15" for now.
Am convinced but cannot prove that the new keyboard is causing wrist/hand pain I thought I’d banished 20 years ago.
Form exceeded function. This isn't much different from stories of Apple power adapters with strain relief that always broke because the designers/marketers prohibited the engineers from making a proper strain relief.
Posting this from my six month old Macbook Pro 15" on which the spacebar has just started doing double spaces. Going to try and clean it with compressed air, but even if that works, it's unacceptable in my opinion that such a key piece of hardware on such an expensive machine should be so fragile. The fact that at some point I'll have to take it back to Apple and probably be without it for several days due to the com…
I try to keep spares of anything mission critical. I get that computers are expensive, but you owe it to yourself to make sure that your productivity cannot be broken by a single object's destruction or absence.
(That doesn't mean you need a spare new macbook pro. An older device that is maintained, and a good environment setup process, is sufficient.)
I recently had one of the new Macbook Pros for work and experienced exactly what the author describes. It happened regularly enough that is was a real issue. I finally got rid of it.
The can of air never resolved the issue either. I had to tap the side of the laptop and press down on the keys.
I honestly wouldn't recommend someone buy one either. They took forever to refresh the MBP and that fact that they released something after all that time with this issue is a joke. I won't be looking at Apple again for my hardware needs.