My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix • Hacker News Board

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#261

Post by swiftcoder » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:02 AM UTC

throwaway85825 wrote: post #197

bloppe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car safety is a bad counterexample because the risk is otherwise often externalized i.e. your car can easily hurt a total stranger whereas the consequences of your choice in laptop are strictly personal. And as GP stated, regulating this sort of thing would definitely force a particular trade-off on everyone. A lot of people would be pissed to have MacBooks with worse "build quality" even if they were more reparable.…

A lot of the recent car safety features are cameras and ADAS which make it safer for pedestrians. The problem is it makes the car so expensive no one can afford to buy it or to repair it. There needs to be some standards to drive down the cost.

Do you have a source for the cameras and ADAS driving up the cost of the cars dramatically?

The €14k Dacia Sandero ships with camera-assisted emergency braking and lane assist. By the time you get up to a €24k MG 4, you get full level 2 driving. These don't seem like very high price thresholds

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#262

Post by hbs18 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:02 AM UTC

avidiax wrote: post #166

BoorishBears wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great example of their point, all I got was a mechanically inferior connector (putting the most important piece of the female connector on a floating sliver of plastic was a choice) and the cable hell attached to USB C. If USB C had been so important to me I wouldn't have bought iPhones all those years.

You also got a connector that supports much more than USB 2.0 speeds. It also supports high power charging, video, thunderbolt, etc. Lightning was a dead-end connector that was only kept around to keep the Made-for-iPhone moat drawbridge up. USB-C makes the right design choice in putting the springs in the cable. Those wear out over time. I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's poss…

> I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible

I know anecdotes don't mean anything, but I have. Every USB-C phone I've ever had, apart from my iPhone that I currently use, ended up with having completely worn out connectors after two-three years of use. They stop holding cables in firm enough and start only making the connection when holding the cable at an angle.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#263

Post by ginko » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:06 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #138

phil21 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppleCare is leaps and bounds better than any other insurance you can buy for mobile or laptops. For accessories I don’t see the point, those are effectively disposable wear items. Ironically a large part of deciding to migrate to an iPhone from android was final frustrations with even Google purchased devices under warranty coupled with hardware quality requiring repairs. My wife’s experience with AppleCare won me o…

Insurance for things you can afford to replace never makes sense anyway. The expected cost of insurance will always exceed the expected cost of replacement in the long run. Unless for some reason you know you will be breaking your device much more than the average person. Insurance is for things that are unlikely to ever happen but would financially ruin you if they did.

>Insurance for things you can afford to replace never makes sense anyway. The expected cost of insurance will always exceed the expected cost of replacement in the long run.

Not sure about Applecare but Lenovo has support packages where if your thinkpad breaks they'll send a technician over to your place to fix it within 24 hours. That's definitely worth it for a work device IMO.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#264

Post by catlikesshrimp » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:09 AM UTC

wolvoleo wrote: post #257

egeozcan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that it's the EU making those regulations, it looks like the government only has to be semi-competent Context: I'm not a EU-native, I've migrated to here. It disturbs me a lot when people keep repeating the "incompetent government" narrative when it comes to the EU, but when you compare it to the dictatorship that I escaped from, they still seem way more competent, surprising when the big advantage of a dicta…

Even here in Europe, most of Southern Europe was a bunch of Dictatorships up into the late 70s! Spain, Portugal, Greece... Not to mention Eastern Europe until the wall fell. All dictatorships in different forms. So yeah we've had our share as well. The problem with the EU is that it seems to be becoming more susceptible to industry lobbying. As of late they are reducing environmental laws (the banning of ICE cars), w…

I hope you don't live to see the return of dictatorships in Europe. And I don't mean Hungary.

https://jacobin.com/2025/05/ve-day-wwii-fascism-liberalism

There's a storm coming.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#265

Post by catlikesshrimp » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:16 AM UTC

hbs18 wrote: post #262

avidiax wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also got a connector that supports much more than USB 2.0 speeds. It also supports high power charging, video, thunderbolt, etc. Lightning was a dead-end connector that was only kept around to keep the Made-for-iPhone moat drawbridge up. USB-C makes the right design choice in putting the springs in the cable. Those wear out over time. I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's poss…

> I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible I know anecdotes don't mean anything, but I have. Every USB-C phone I've ever had, apart from my iPhone that I currently use, ended up with having completely worn out connectors after two-three years of use. They stop holding cables in firm enough and start only making the connection when holding the cable at an angle.

Could you mention what phone models were those. I haven't seen one port go bad.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#266

Post by 999900000999 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:17 AM UTC

streetfighter64 wrote: post #245

999900000999 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my first thought too. Not everything you personally dislike needs to be illegal. MacBooks are great as long as you have the money. OP could keep looking for 3rd party repairs, etc.

> Not everything you personally dislike needs to be illegal. I'm having a hard time seeing why making stuff more difficult to repair just so that people are incentivized to throw it away and buy a new one, should not be illegal. If not for the anti-customer attitude, at least for the amount of waste and environmental destruction it results in.

Half the responses in this thread are from people who replaced the keyboard for about 50$ or so.

Even then, if I want a new ultra thin device that doesn’t have replaceable storage or user input devices, that’s my right to buy.

Who is going to magically determine what replaceable means ? From the post it looks like OP tried to fix it incorrectly.

Does apple owe op a new laptop even if they damaged it ?

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#267

Post by catlikesshrimp » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:22 AM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #154

BoorishBears wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great example of their point, all I got was a mechanically inferior connector (putting the most important piece of the female connector on a floating sliver of plastic was a choice) and the cable hell attached to USB C. If USB C had been so important to me I wouldn't have bought iPhones all those years.

If Lightning is so important to you then you can still use Lightning-based iPhones. Nobody took away the hardware they sold you, they just mandated that the new ones adopt a common standard.

If lightning was vastly superior, they could still have a lightning port in addition to the usb, or make a different version with their propietary port for the rest of the world. But it wasn't superior.

I understand the added difficulty of making a version with a different port. Again, if it was Uber superior, it would have made for very good advertisemebt for apple.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#268

Post by hypeatei » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:24 AM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #148

Esophagus4 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being an effective market doesn’t mean you get everything you want. You’re actually saying: “I want Apple’s software, and I want certain chips, and I want a certain form factor. And if Apple won’t build what I want, I will pass a law to make them build it for me!” Come on man. You will make tradeoffs either way. The answer isn’t: force a company to build what I want them to build.

Well another version of it is: I want to be able to talk to my family, but I don't want to buy an iPhone. The EU rightly regulated that any chat network big enough must open their doors to different platforms. Or I don't want to buy Microsoft Office for my employees but I want to be able to do business with those who do, and thankfully we have relatively open document formats now. The chips argument is contrived, the…

> I want to be able to talk to my family, but I don't want to buy an iPhone

How were you not able to do this without an iPhone?

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#269

Post by throw_a_grenade » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:24 AM UTC

egeozcan wrote: post #214

hnfong wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s time to accept regulation actually does work when you have a competent government. Given that it's the EU making those regulations, it looks like the government only has to be semi-competent. Maybe the only requirement is that they're not totally in bed with the big corps making money.

> Given that it's the EU making those regulations, it looks like the government only has to be semi-competent Context: I'm not a EU-native, I've migrated to here. It disturbs me a lot when people keep repeating the "incompetent government" narrative when it comes to the EU, but when you compare it to the dictatorship that I escaped from, they still seem way more competent, surprising when the big advantage of a dicta…

It's a bit of hit and miss, really. Like every big organisation, it's not a single, coherent entity, but has branches and departments filled by real, flawed people, so in practice it depends on which industry your're in. For example, digital policy bureaucrats are usually extremely competent, like, they do know how the stuff discussed here on HN works. (That they often have differen expectations from what people here want is orthogonal). Automotive industry is on the other hand squarely in bed with manufacturers (cars, but also accessories like child safety chairs). The average is suprisingly good, esp. in comparison with national bureaucracies.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#270

Post by cpt_sobel » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 11:28 AM UTC

internet2000 wrote: post #55

wvenable wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, this is a bad solution. You didn't say why this is a bad solution. The government mandates that cars get safer every year and fatalities are down 78% from the 1960s. Whenever government regulates things to benefit people, people tend to benefit. > One of the things macbook users praise the most is "build quality", which often means the solidity of the device, lack of flex, etc. It seems like the Macbook Neo has…

> It seems like the Macbook Neo has a lot of those properties as well for a very inexpensive device that is extremely easy to repair. It's slightly worse, slightly more flex, thicker and heavier vs an Air in spite of having a smaller battery and more empty space. It's all trade offs. If you want repairable, please buy a Framework or Lenovo. Backseat industrial designing through legislation is not the answer.

> Backseat industrial designing through legislation is not the answer.

But it _could_ save us from Lenovo or Dell or any other company copying Apple's design practices (and the latter largely already has), while, as another poster mentioned, not mandating design per se, but rather just setting minimum standards.