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MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

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Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#111

Post by PhantomGremlin »

ramraj07 wrote: post #69
cletus wrote: post #18

I actually blame Johnny Ive for this clusterf*ck. Ive famously pursued a crusade for thinness. It's said that design is the art of compromise. Well, Ive took a no compromises approach to thinness and it showed. Look no further than the 12" Macbook. One port (also needed for power), lower power CPU and (I believe?) the start of the dreaded butterfly keyboard. IIRC the butterfly keyboard's raison d'etre was to shave ha…

Is it really his fault though? Apple from the beginning pushed the boundaries multiples faster than any other company by asking the engineers to create the impossible, and more often than not they delivered. The butterfly keyboard did work, it just had reliability issues (I loved typing on the butterfly as long as it worked). The problem was that they tried to never take the complaints seriously in the open while sec…

We reap the benefits of the dogged pursuit by the crazies in the company which just means once in a while they also screw up something.

All companies screw up. Much worse than Apple screwing up is that they continued to obfuscate and prevaricate and deny.

Repeatedly. For years.

In other words, they doubled down (actually tripled down, 3 editions of butterfly) on stupidity.

Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#112

Post by _ph_ »

samatman wrote: post #14
_ph_ wrote: post #9

Keyboards shouldn't fail as often as the butterfly keyboards did (and the fact that the most commonly used letters tended to fail first points rather to a wear issue than just breadcrumbs), but most of all, it shouldn't take more than $100 to exchange a failed keyboard. But with the "repair" costs charged for the laptops, they become a write-off basically as soon as they fail out of warranty.

Apple extended no-questions-asked replacement for butterfly keyboards for something like four years after sale. Don't recall if they refunded replacements before they put that policy in place though. Mostly mentioning this in case someone is sitting on an out-of-warranty MacBook with a failed keyboard. My left command key quitting on one of those MBPs brought me right up to the edge of bailing on the whole ecosystem;…

4 years is not very much when you consider the laptop a total loss, if the keyboard fails after that time. And we don't know how many laptops already have been trashed when their keyboard failed before this extended repair program was started. This is the problem with any device which cannot be repaired for a reasonable sum in the case of a defect.

Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#113

Post by samatman »

alex504 wrote: post #17
samatman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple extended no-questions-asked replacement for butterfly keyboards for something like four years after sale. Don't recall if they refunded replacements before they put that policy in place though. Mostly mentioning this in case someone is sitting on an out-of-warranty MacBook with a failed keyboard. My left command key quitting on one of those MBPs brought me right up to the edge of bailing on the whole ecosystem;…

4 years seems like a bit of an insult in this scenario. These laptops are very expensive bought new and this is a defect; you would think they would repair them for life or at least as long as the life of the laptop. I've been using the same MBR laptop since 2013 for personal use and haven't found any reason to switch. I would be pretty mad if I owned one of these and had to get it fixed, or wanted to resell it and h…

The most plausible theory for why they stuck with the butterfly board that long, is that Jony Ive didn't leave the company until 2019.

Word is, it was his baby, and he was convinced that if they just kept tweaking it, they would get it right eventually.

The keyboard I'm typing on feels identical to every other MacBook keyboard I've owned, going back to the titanium PowerBook G4. I expect it will prove comparably durable: never had a key skip or double-press on any of them, and I go hard on my equipment.

I actually liked the crispness of the butterfly keys, but absolute reliability is a hard requirement and they just weren't.

Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#114

Post by nikanj »

ActorNightly wrote: post #30
Goosee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use to have the same thought process as you: instantly sold on devices with native hdmi, usb a & usb c. By that metric xps beats macbook. Recently I tried to convert to a windows laptop from my 16 inch mbp. Upon switching I was constantly annoyed by the fan noise & using my pinkie to press the 'control' key opposed to macbook thumb on 'command' key. The point is, I realized native port selection was not a metric to…

The thing with "windows" laptops is that you can install and run Linux seamlessly out of the box, even distros that Mimic the look of OSX, and remap the keys to your hearts content.

What people in the OSS land don't seem to understand is that the button shapes and control colors are not the killer feature of MacOS.

I can get a "looks like OSX" theme for KDE easily, but KDE will still be weirdly unstable, and have tons of impedance mismatch between it's components. You can't make a Ferrari out of a Ford by painting it the right shade of red.

Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#115

Post by gogopuppygogo »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #55
cletus wrote: post #18

I actually blame Johnny Ive for this clusterf*ck. Ive famously pursued a crusade for thinness. It's said that design is the art of compromise. Well, Ive took a no compromises approach to thinness and it showed. Look no further than the 12" Macbook. One port (also needed for power), lower power CPU and (I believe?) the start of the dreaded butterfly keyboard. IIRC the butterfly keyboard's raison d'etre was to shave ha…

I don't believe the Air got rid of the Touch Bar -- it never had it. It was only on the Pro. What's so "Pro" about replacing the useful function keys (including the escape key) with a bar that does nothing but pick emojis is beyond me. I strongly dislike the Touch Bar. I'm typing this on a 2019 MacBook Pro whose Touch Bar died yesterday, leaving me with no escape key, no volume buttons, no keyboard brightness buttons…

The new 2019 MBP has a physical escape key. The touch bar is fantastic for my needs. I love being able to adjust applications with a touch panel slider. I do audio/video work from time to time.

I can see programmers hating it though.

Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#116

Post by cehrlich »

cletus wrote: post #18

I actually blame Johnny Ive for this clusterf*ck. Ive famously pursued a crusade for thinness. It's said that design is the art of compromise. Well, Ive took a no compromises approach to thinness and it showed. Look no further than the 12" Macbook. One port (also needed for power), lower power CPU and (I believe?) the start of the dreaded butterfly keyboard. IIRC the butterfly keyboard's raison d'etre was to shave ha…

I mostly agree with you, although I'd make one pedantic argument:

The 12" MacBook made a great set of compromises (other than keyboard reliability) for the goal it intended to achieve. I had one for several years and loved it.

The mistake was taking the compromises from the 12" and applying them to the rest of the lineup, where they made no sense at all.

Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#117

Post by gnicholas »

irjustin wrote: post #47
cletus wrote: post #18

I actually blame Johnny Ive for this clusterf*ck. Ive famously pursued a crusade for thinness. It's said that design is the art of compromise. Well, Ive took a no compromises approach to thinness and it showed. Look no further than the 12" Macbook. One port (also needed for power), lower power CPU and (I believe?) the start of the dreaded butterfly keyboard. IIRC the butterfly keyboard's raison d'etre was to shave ha…

FWIW, I enjoy the touch bar. I have a few custom keys, one which runs a script that finds my airpods, connects, turns on eq (boom), starts spotify, sets volume my normal level, hits play. I do hate it when the touchbar crashes and requires a reboot, but I've gotten so much milage out of my script keys that I'd rather keep it.

> I do hate it when the touchbar crashes and requires a reboot

I don't even want to consider the possibility of my keyboard crashing. Imagine if that happened on iOS! Input devices have to be 100% rock-solid.

Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#118

Post by tomduncalf »

behnamoh wrote: post #89
TheRealSteel wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I've done, but I hate having to adjust my typing habit. It's annoying enough that thanks to the touch bar I'm now incapable of typing escape on any other computer (because I'm in the habit of merely touching escape, not pushing it), now I have to adjust again and I'm going to be in the habit of pushing caps lock.

Believe me, you'll love using Caps Lock instead of ESC very soon. I switched the two using Karabiner (for mac) and I wonder how I used computers all those years before that. If you use vim (or vimium on Firefox), you'll absolutely like this change.

You can switch it in keyboard preferences under “modifier keys” now, no need for Karibiner any more. Can’t remember when this was changed but it was a few years back

Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#119

Post by gnicholas »

samatman wrote: post #14
_ph_ wrote: post #9

Keyboards shouldn't fail as often as the butterfly keyboards did (and the fact that the most commonly used letters tended to fail first points rather to a wear issue than just breadcrumbs), but most of all, it shouldn't take more than $100 to exchange a failed keyboard. But with the "repair" costs charged for the laptops, they become a write-off basically as soon as they fail out of warranty.

Apple extended no-questions-asked replacement for butterfly keyboards for something like four years after sale. Don't recall if they refunded replacements before they put that policy in place though. Mostly mentioning this in case someone is sitting on an out-of-warranty MacBook with a failed keyboard. My left command key quitting on one of those MBPs brought me right up to the edge of bailing on the whole ecosystem;…

> Apple extended no-questions-asked replacement for butterfly keyboards for something like four years after sale.

That's only a 1-year extension for people who bought AppleCare. And after you drop out of the warranty period, your machine is basically one speck of dust away from being useless.

A fairer policy would be to give AppleCare customers longer for no-cost fixes, and to offer everyone a reasonably-priced repair for the life of the machine (I was told it would be something north of $700 after the warranty period).

Re: MacBook Owners' Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Gets Class Action Certification

#120

Post by Qub3d »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #44
batterylow wrote: post #2

It's the worst typing experience I've had to date https://datacrayon.com/posts/tools/misc/macbook-butterfly-ke...

I'm one of the rare weirdos who really likes the feel of the butterfly keyboard. I love the snappy, tappy reaction. The new "magic" keyboards feel mushy in comparison. BUT… my 2016 MBP is on its third keyboard, and seems ready for a fourth. AND… for four years I've been wondering if my typing has been getting progressively worse worse; a couple weeks ago I picked up an M1 Air as a kind of stopgap while waiting for th…

FWIW, I went from a 2014 Macbook Pro to a 2019 16 inch model (first one that went back to the "magic" keyboard) and I find the keys noticeably more snappy; I suppose my old rubber domes may have worn out, but the travel is definitely less, and its sharper.
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