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Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

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Re: Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

#161

Post by snowwrestler »

luckydata wrote: post #83

I'm a little surprised anyone is surprised by this story. Apple has a long history of making questionable engineering decisions that end making their products nigh unusable and then steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the issue until evidence becomes too hard to deny. It happened with the iMacs multiple times, with the phones multiple times, with the MacBooks multiple times... By now we should know and not give them…

Another way to look at this is that Apple takes risks, which sometimes don't work out. But sometimes they do, and so Apple tends to give new features or products enough time for the answer to become clear.

I'm old enough to remember the outcry when the "chiclet" keyboard style replaced the older mechanical keyboards across the line, even for desktop machines. Those complaints faded in time, and now apparently people remember the chiclets fondly compared to the new keyboards!

For what it's worth I just got a laptop with the new keyboard and although it's louder, I love the feel of it. But--I have not had any keyboard problems yet. If I do, I'm sure I'll be pissed about it. (Hoping that I won't though...)

Re: Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

#162

Post by pooya13 »

ericmcer wrote: post #111
pooya13 wrote: post #59

This was the case with my 2015 MacBook a couple of years ago. The “geniuses” were refusing to fix the keyboard free of charge until they realized I was aware of the law suite and their attitude suddenly changed to “we will fix it for free because we have a great customer support”. I garantee there are people who didn’t know better and paid for it. And I highly doubt that “it’s a small percentage of the customers” aff…

I don't understand why the workers would do that. There is no incentive for them to get you to pay for it. I worked retail for 8ish years and I was usually as good to the customer as my company would allow. It would be bizarre for me to try to hoodwink a customer out of a free repair I am authorized to provide, because I felt some bizarre loyalty to my corporation.

I suspect that it was because at that stage Apple was still in denial about the issue.

Re: Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

#163

Post by aiddun »

jasonsync wrote: post #28

My report: I just got a new MacBook Air a few weeks ago, to replace an aging MacBook Air. Retina display is a huge upgrade, and USB C is great (I don't miss the mag safe charger as much as I thought I would). The keyboard though ... Week 1: For the first week the keyboard was great (although more clacky sounding than the older model). Week 2: The R key started misfiring. Press the R key 10 times, you only get 8 Rs on…

I recently got a new MBP as a graduation gift and had the same experience with you. Everything was going great until about a month in when the space bar started randomly double pressing, sometimes putting periods mid sentence. It's in the shop now. Coming from using an already pre-owned Thinkpad Yoga for many years with a perfect keyboard, this is crazy for a product like this.

Re: Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

#164

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

jasonsync wrote: post #28

My report: I just got a new MacBook Air a few weeks ago, to replace an aging MacBook Air. Retina display is a huge upgrade, and USB C is great (I don't miss the mag safe charger as much as I thought I would). The keyboard though ... Week 1: For the first week the keyboard was great (although more clacky sounding than the older model). Week 2: The R key started misfiring. Press the R key 10 times, you only get 8 Rs on…

I’ve had many of these machines. It’s very likely only a matter of time before that R key gives you trouble again, or one of the surrounding ones.

Re: Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

#165

Post by spronkey »

dpkonofa wrote: post #87
X-Istence wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that Apple has often been replacing logic boards when this type of thing happens as well. Some people see it as a good thing, but it usually results in the complete wipe of data. You should have backups anyway. Especially with Time Machine it's dead simple to keep good backups.

Dead simple and 100% free. I seriously do not understand how every person with a Mac is not using Time Machine. It is the best, easiest, and most dummy-proof backup solution I've ever seen. The world somehow made a better dummy.

Time machine is glacially slow, and it is finicky to use with network storage, and doesn't play nice with non-macs. Newer portable Macs had been annoying to use with most existing external storage until rather recently because of Type C.

Re: Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

#166

Post by spronkey »

8draco8 wrote: post #15
ramijames wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My time isn't free. The fact that I have to deal with this at all makes me never want to buy another Mac and I have been a heavy user for at least 20 years. Super annoyed.

Companies like Dell and Lenovo just ships fault element if it's possible to replace it yourself and in many cases it is possible to replace keyboard without to much hustle. Not to mention their on premise warranty which usually cost somewhere around AppleCare plan. If I am working on a hardware, 9 hours a day 5,6 or even 7 days a week I don't have time to sit in Apple store for hours. Even worst, in country where I a…

Both Dell and Lenovo are getting worse when it comes to easy repair though. Newer Thinkpads have been nightmareish for keyboard replacements.

Re: Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

#167

Post by ulfw »

jm4 wrote: post #154
raydev wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can there be any doubt this is what precipitated Ive’s departure? That this precipitated his departure is doubtful. Ive has had one foot out the door for a few years.

This keyboard has been a disaster for a few years. If it’s true that Ive was the one pushing it then it would be ignorant to think that this failure hasn’t had an impact on his standing within the company. This is a massive failure. We are talking about a part that experiences more physical wear and tear than any other in the computer and that requires a logic board replacement as part of the repair process. That’s a…

A lot of Ive's later designs have been a disaster.

I dropped my iPhone XS Max from a tiny height. It being made out of (not great) glass, the backside immediately shattered. Oh well. What shocked me was how incredibly stupid the phone was put together. The back glass (unlike the front where the screen is!) can not be replaced without replacing the whole phone.

The whole case you mean?

No. The. Whole. Phone.

"Thankfully" Apple was kind enough to only charge me $500 for the replacement phone rather than the $1300 it cost to begin with. But one thing I can assure you. I will never buy a (in total) $1800 phone again.

Re: Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

#169

Post by dpkonofa »

spronkey wrote: post #165
dpkonofa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead simple and 100% free. I seriously do not understand how every person with a Mac is not using Time Machine. It is the best, easiest, and most dummy-proof backup solution I've ever seen. The world somehow made a better dummy.

Time machine is glacially slow, and it is finicky to use with network storage, and doesn't play nice with non-macs. Newer portable Macs had been annoying to use with most existing external storage until rather recently because of Type C.

I have to disagree on all points. If you leave it on, you don't have to worry about its speed because it's always up-to-date. The first backup may be slow but you shouldn't be waiting until an emergency to do that anyways. I have also had 0 issues backing it up to my Synology. I literally enabled Time Machine on the Synology, enabled it on the Mac, and I've never had to worry about it again.

Re: Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty

#170

Post by hiram112 »

pault wrote: post #63
hiram112 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still am trying to figure out what WSL has solved for anyone. It works fine for the little tutorials they use to showcase it, but on any real project it is just as bad as what many of us have had to do for the last 10 years if we were stuck with Windows: use a VM with all the problems it brings like using extra CPU and memory, poor filesystem performance, duplicating tools and configs in both the Windows and Linux…

I'm not sure what your threshold is for a real project, but I've been using it for multi-stack dev environments with no trouble at all for the past year. You shouldn't use it to host a production environment, but I'm not sure why you would want to. What it solves is you don't have to use the minority, poorly supported windows ports of your language runtime, if it even has one. Many smaller languages I've tried don't…

I'm definitely not running a production environment. But imagine this scenario:

I've got my Linux shell with various tools like GIt, JDK, NPM, NVM, Maven, etc. All the config files are setup in my Linux home in the VM. But the whole point of WSL is that I can use the nice GUIs available on Windows. So now I've SourceTree for Git, IntelliJ, WebStorm, etc running on Windows. And they all need the same tools installed like maven, Git, JDK, etc.

First problem is that the I now have to duplicate all the tools in both Windows and Linux - all sorts of fun problems when they get out of sync. Same with the config files which are always screwing up due to differences in line endings and path slashes.

But the worst of all is performance. If I compile some huge multi-module Scala and Java project completely in native Windows, it takes five minutes. Doing it in WSL bash takes 15 minutes. And having my IDE in Windows doing it on the code that's on the Linux WSL filesystem takes 60 minutes, assuming it even works with all the path and line ending problems as the tools are sometimes called in Windows, sometimes called in Linux.

Exact same problems with python apps, Node apps, and everything else that is common these days.

It's absolutely no better than what I did 10 years ago when I had my company spend $200 for VMWare Workstation license and I ran Fedora or Ubuntu VMs with Linux, but still tried to use Windows for half the build. Same with Cygwin...

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