The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

Post by dzhiurgis » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:10 AM UTC

thadk wrote: post #75

corey_moncure wrote: post #69

Was the old keyboard engineering so bad? I feel like Apple has been fixing what wasn't broken since about 2010, regarding the MBP at least. Literally all they needed to do was retina screen, upgrade the internals, and add a few USB-C ports. Was anyone ever legitimately inconvenienced by the thickness of the 2010 MBP? I know I was directly inconvenienced by the loss of MagSafe, ethernet, SD card and USB-A, the loss of…

The area around the hinge on the 2011-2015 Era Macbook was plastic. It seems like they wanted to do away with that, a major mechanical break point, which meant removing travel distance from the keys so the screen could close more directly. (My 2011 MBP screen hinge was a bit wobbly a few years in.) You could look at the USB-C dongles in a similar way: older USB ports could fail eventually on that era MBP. The newer U…

Post by ulfw » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:19 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #8

This is in-line with the the 'under promise and over deliver" mantra I was taught at Apple Retail. Don't make any promises you can't keep, and silently start to fix issues like this. Apple having a hardware fix for their keyboard disasters in this revision is also inline with their repair program they just issued.

Post by greglindahl » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

handbanana wrote: post #46

skygazer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This [0] from this morning was interesting. Apparently AppleInsider has been monitoring a number of Genius Bar and authorized service centers for warranty repairs of 2014 thru 2017 laptops. It seems 2016 MBPs had the most keyboard issues, and the 2017 version brought the claims back down to (and below) 2014/15 levels. So, it might be reasonable to say they fixed it last year, in terms of prevalence of issues, althoug…

I’d be interested to see a breakdown of reasons the keyboards failed for each model year. And what percentage of the pre butterfly design were because of sand/dust etc. then contrast that to the butterfly design percentage. They could have merely improved reliability in another way(s) with the butterfly design.

Post by drewmol » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:24 AM UTC

tinus_hn wrote: post #103

userbinator wrote: post #20

The fact that the membrane is still vented (labeled 321 in the diagram) suggests that this will only delay, and not fix the dust ingress problem. Indeed, it could make things worse by creating a tiny pump[1] that draws particles in on each keystroke. I don't know why they didn't vent from the bottom instead, but that's how completely sealed (i.e. waterproof) keypads are vented. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaph…

>> Edit: wow, downvotes? Care to explain...? > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Don’t worry about downvotes, even if you care about the karma points you can at most get to -4 anyway.

Post by djhworld » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:00 AM UTC

lancewiggs wrote: post #6

They fixed the keyboard, increased the max memory to 32GB and stuck to their guns on the touch bar - and that all seems reasonable to me. (I’m far more annoyed by Microsoft removing ESC as the dbox cancel key for errors in Excel than the disappearance of the ESC key)