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Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

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Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#21

Post by kkarakk »

i am absolutely laughing at this macbook pro 2017 i bought. the keyboard has been replaced 3 times now...the screen was replaced for stagelight effect(broken connector)...they replaced the whole top bit for that(everything north of the hinge gets replaced)

i finally pawned it off on someone else and they promptly fried the motherboard due to water damage(the air intake ports lead directly to the motherboard so good luck to any starbucks warriors out there) so that got replaced too.

Ship of theseus in action - a macbook story. only the bottom baseplate is from the original macbook at this point.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#22

Post by kkarakk »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #9

“seven elements that every keyboard needs to create a great typing experience.” I have a hard time imagining what those seven elements are, because I get stuck at two: 1. Produces the characters 2. That I intended to type. These two attributes are also, incidentally, what the biggest and most-valuable tech companies in the world are somehow grappling with anew. Oh come on. Having a keyboard that causes as little fati…

>1. Produces the characters 2. That I intended to type.

if it helps, the butterfly mechanism fails at doing that if even a tiny speck of dust/grit gets in the mechanism

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#24

Post by thought_alarm »

ajma wrote: post #2

hmm... am I alone in being someone who likes the butterfly keyboard?

The arrow keys are one of the most essential parts of a keyboard for people who write a lot of code or otherwise do a lot of copyediting.

This type of user needs to be able to lock on to the arrow keys repeatedly and unconsciously without fail throughout the work day.

Apple's keyboard designers understood this and got it right for over 15 years. But that changed in 2016.

As of 2016, Apple's new keyboards provide zero affordances for these kinds of users and are completely unsuitable for real work.

You couldn't pay me enough to use one of these keyboard for writing code, and I certainly wouldn't pay my own money for one.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#25

Post by mnm1 »

Apple makes shit hardware now and has for a few years. The Apple of old is gone. People need to accept that. The keyboard is shit. The trackpad is too big. And the screen has issues too. Desktop/laptop software, other than OS X, has always been shit. OS X is slowly turning into iOS which is a locked down piece of garbage. This is reality and no amount of fanboyism is going to change that. The alternative is Windows which is an adware riddled spy machine or Linux for which every year is the year of the desktop but not quite. I suppose a Hackintosh could work for some people too who want the OS X experience but don't want to deal with shit hardware. There's plenty of choice in the Windows world for people that don't mind spyware and adware. And Linux is pretty much the same year in, year out. Those are the choices for serious computing. We need to get used to them. I know what I'm going with next upgrade.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#26

Post by sundvor »

paxys wrote: post #14

> “So, just curious, why did you buy another one?” she asked, referring to the 2018 MacBook Air I’d gotten six months after selling the Pro. I was hoping she talked more about this part, but brushing it aside by bringing up "Apple ecosystem" is pretty unsatisfactory. It does tell you, though, that Apple has its target demographic by the balls, and broken keyboards are certainly not chasing them away. Macbooks will ge…

My laptop of choice (X1 Carbon) consistently gets a pretty good rep for its keyboard. I'm still using my ~6.5 year old first generation (top spec) and the keyboard remains flawless.

But then again they actually test for foreign particle ingression:

https://solutions.lenovo.com/resource-center/pc-solutions/pa...

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#28

Post by Dylan16807 »

mwfunk wrote: post #17
Dylan16807 wrote: post #9

“seven elements that every keyboard needs to create a great typing experience.” I have a hard time imagining what those seven elements are, because I get stuck at two: 1. Produces the characters 2. That I intended to type. These two attributes are also, incidentally, what the biggest and most-valuable tech companies in the world are somehow grappling with anew. Oh come on. Having a keyboard that causes as little fati…

She was being sarcastic. She wasn't saying that nothing else matters, she was saying that nothing else matters if it fails at being a functional keyboard.

But Apple is the only one grappling with that. It's not what Microsoft's presentation is going to be about.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#29

Post by SenHeng »

ajma wrote: post #2

hmm... am I alone in being someone who likes the butterfly keyboard?

Been using them for several years now and I like them a lot too. I have the v2 MacBook where the 'b' key got stuck once but I managed to fix with some can of air spray. Have had various MBPs at work and most of been fine too.

I've always had a habit ofregularly clean my keyboards too which I think may have helped reduce the amount of dirt getting stuck underneath.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#30

Post by rarrrrr »

wyclif wrote: post #16

P.T. Barnum (possibly) said it best: "There's a sucker born every minute." There are a lot of suckers out there with MacBooks.

After watching Louis Rossmann's live repairs and informed bitching, I bought an almost maxed-out Lenovo T480 on the President's Day sale and hackintoshed it. Water-resistant, backlit keyboard that's awesome and isn't crazy loud/fragile. 16 GiB, WQHD (could be brighter), Samsung 1 TiB 970 Pro and giant extended battery. 9 hour run-time. MIL-spec rated.

EDIT: I had a pre-Retina A1278 mid-2012 MBP with 16 GiB and 2 SSD's for a long time. MagSafe 1, okay keyboard, generally bulletproof for a while until the external ports and logic board traces started corroding from humidity and temperature extremes. :( I bought a broken screen MBP for $170 USD to get a working logic board cheap to recover and migrate off. Donated to a sane-but-poor itinerant writer/journalist/commercial fisherman.

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