I have Dell XPS 13. When keyboard broke (probably my fault), technician come to my house next day and replaced it in front of me. For free, as part of basic warranty. I was on holiday in other country...
Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
11–20 of 291 posts
Re: Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
#12I despise my new Macbook's touchbar. I can't get to the volume button without stopping what I'm doing for 4-5 seconds to find the key, then press multiple buttons, I can't use the function keys, and it generally adds no value.
Just use the buttons on your wired headphones which are equally compatible with your iPhone and Mac... oh, wait.
Great shitpost, too bad none wired headphones like the crowd favourites qc35 and others have volume keys too. Its sad to think that you cannot get out of your bubble and realise that this is not objectively a bad design choice, but some of us actually enjoy and applaude it.
Re: Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
#13My work gave me one of the 2016 15" MBPs as my main computer, and the keyboard is horrible. My V key double-presses about half the time, and the rest of the keys are really hard to press down all the way. Some of the keys make a weird metal rattle when I press them. Typing on that wretched keyboard for more than an hour or so literally bruises my fingers. Since I do most of my day-to-day work at a dock with an extern…
My biggest beaf with the TouchBar: volume takes two clicks! Instead of an up down and mute button, I get mute and volume which then opens a slider to the left of the click. So instead of just clicking once to lower volume I have to click, move my finger and slide. It would be so easy to allow custom button to add back on (and maybe there is that I haven't been able to find?)
I also accidentally 'touch my pinky finger when typing my password (numbers) and it registers as touch even though I'm not applying downward force. In Chrome thank god I could remove the refresh button, would accidentally refresh login pages all the time.
Re: Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
#14This, so much. Plus, call me clumsy, but the number of times I have accidentally triggered one of the magic bar buttons is beyond count. In everyday use, it often feels like my computer just randomly mutes system audio or locks the display (I had to get rid of the Siri button, it's incredibly annoying).
All of that besides the fact that you cannot really use VIM any more because the ESC button is gone...
Re: Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
#15This, so much. Plus, call me clumsy, but the number of times I have accidentally triggered one of the magic bar buttons is beyond count. In everyday use, it often feels like my computer just randomly mutes system audio or locks the display (I had to get rid of the Siri button, it's incredibly annoying). All of that besides the fact that you cannot really use VIM any more because the ESC button is gone...
As a vim user, I don't find the software escape to be bad—it's always in the same spot, even if it's not a physical key. Also, in vim, you can use ctrl-[ instead of escape (which is arguably better anyway).
Re: Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
#16My work gave me one of the 2016 15" MBPs as my main computer, and the keyboard is horrible. My V key double-presses about half the time, and the rest of the keys are really hard to press down all the way. Some of the keys make a weird metal rattle when I press them. Typing on that wretched keyboard for more than an hour or so literally bruises my fingers. Since I do most of my day-to-day work at a dock with an extern…
My biggest beaf with the TouchBar: volume takes two clicks! Instead of an up down and mute button, I get mute and volume which then opens a slider to the left of the click. So instead of just clicking once to lower volume I have to click, move my finger and slide. It would be so easy to allow custom button to add back on (and maybe there is that I haven't been able to find?) I also accidentally 'touch my pinky finger…
You can just put your finger on the slider key and slide. No need for tap, let go, slide. It's pretty natural.
Re: Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
#17We had a candidate come in for interviews, and one of them was a video-conference programming session with a remote interviewer. We set them up with a Macbook (running Windows/Bootcamp) for live-coding.
The candidate hit the Power button, located where DEL used to be. Laptop goes to sleep (candidate said it shut down but it probably just went to sleep). He gets it back up but then it needs a login etc., so he had to go find us non-remote staff to log back in, join VPN etc. Took about 5 minutes out of the interview, partly due to confusion + logging back into the things.
I can't for the life of me understand why so many vendors have put this button on the keyboard. It was so simple and sensible to have it somewhere else.
Edited: Macbook running Windows, probably just went to sleep but disruptive nonetheless, combination of hardware+software to blame.
Re: Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
#18The new MBPs are such a mixed bag for me.. I got one at work, while I still use a 2012 MBP, and I go back and forth on some things....
1) New keyboard took a while to get used to, and it does seem like they are a little finicky. After a while, I've gotten used to the feel of it and actually prefer it for the most part. The arrow keys are really hard to use, though..
I do hate that it is such an expensive/involved thing to replace the keyboard.
2) The enlarged trackpad is kinda nice sometimes, but really hard to use other times.. The way I rest my hands on my laptop when I'm using it while sitting back or lying down always results in mis-clicks and other problems with the new trackpad. I'd rather have the smaller-sized one, but I realize others may not have the same problems I do.
3) TouchID is really handy, but the TouchBar is an unfortunate gimmick. I keep trying to find good uses for it, but it mostly ends up being kinda useless - anything I can do with it, I could do before with less work. I hope it goes away, or at least becomes an optional thing in the future.
Overall, while it is nice to have a laptop that is smaller/lighter, the way Apple is sacrificing all sorts of other stuff (performance, repairability) to minimize size/weight sometimes feels wrong for what it supposed to be a professional series laptop.
Re: Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
#19We had a candidate come in for interviews, and one of them was a video-conference programming session with a remote interviewer. We set them up with a Macbook (running Windows/Bootcamp) for live-coding. The candidate hit the Power button, located where DEL used to be. Laptop goes to sleep (candidate said it shut down but it probably just went to sleep). He gets it back up but then it needs a login etc., so he had to…
Nothing about this makes much sense - regardless of which generation macbook you're using hitting the power button accidentally will not turn it off (you can try it right now). Did your interviewee keep pressing on it for like 10 seconds?
Re: Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
#20The best kind of controversial Apple design is one that people grumble about because it's ahead of its time, but which ultimately replaces one way of doing things with another that's better for most use cases. See: ditching floppies and adopting USB on the first iMac.
The worst kind of controversial Apple design is one that people grumble about because it's aesthetically pleasing but actually makes the product less user-friendly. See: the hockey-puck mouse on the first iMac.
Regarding that second kind, sometimes Apple recognizes their mistake and, in a future iteration, completely replaces the bad design with a better one. More recently, they seem too infatuated with their initial design decisions and just keep putting band-aids on fundamentally flawed implementations. The butterfly keyboard mentioned in TFA is on its third(!) revision, and it's still clearly flawed. Another example: Apple "fixed" the impossible-to-tell-in-the-dark-which-way-you're holding-it Apple TV remote by putting a single tactile ring around one button, rather than just designing an ergonomic remote that makes it tougher for you to accidentally engage the touchpad and cancel out of the movie you're watching.
So why might Apple underestimate the severity of bad design decisions?
Apple's direction with the Mac lineup as of late is a great example of "success hides problems." [1] Supposedly, the 2016 MacBook Pros sold very well, despite a number of bad design choices that put form over function:
- The keyboard design as described in TFA
- The touch bar (only available on the high end models). The designer must have really hated those useless, ugly fkeys. But instead of putting the touch bar above the fkeys, they eliminated them. The touch bar is not a substitute, unless all you used the fkeys for was changing volume, etc.
- Eliminated all other ports in favor of USB-C, which while great in theory is in fact a highly fragmented incompatible ecosystem of poor quality peripherals and cables that don't give the user any visual indicator as to whether they work together. [2]
IMHO, many if not most of these MacBook Pro customers are buying not because of these bad design decisions but in spite of them. Computers are amazing because they're fun and powerful general purpose machines. These machines may meet some subset of people's needs better than the old ones did. But in exchange for that, they've stopped (or soon will stop) meeting the needs of many, many more.
Somebody once said "design is how it works." If you live in a sterile white world where there's no dust and you never plug anything into your laptop, maybe this product works for you. The rest of us don't have that luxury.