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The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

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Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#161

Post by coldtea »

garmaine wrote: post #160
coldtea wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, they just issued a repair program. Until precisely 3 weeks ago Apple refused to acknowledge the issue and forced customers to pay for costly repairs on their own dime. This patent was filed in September 2016. Apple was fucking lying through their teeth for a full 22 months and have been caught in that lie. Do you expect companies to immediately jump to full repair programs the minute the first few users compla…

> Do you expect companies to immediately jump to full repair programs the minute the first few users complain? They designed a fix innovative enough to file a patent on, 22 months before they acknowledged the issue. That requires costly engineering time and organizational direction that is not used on a whim. They knew back then that this was a real issue.

>They designed a fix innovative enough to file a patent on, 22 months before they acknowledged the issue.

They work on changes, ideas, and improvements all the time, and they have 1000s of similar patents for everything, doesn't mean the work that lead to that patent was a response to the specific product issue -- could be just a patent about avoiding dust in keyboards in general (a problem that harks back to the ages).

>That requires costly engineering time and organizational direction that is not used on a whim.

Again, you'd be surprised. It just requires the idea, and someone to write it in patent-ease. They have patents for all sorts of ideas and some make it into products while others never see the light of day. They literally use those "on a whim". For Apple filling a patent is peanut money.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/01/24/apple-exploring-s...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/03/23/apple-pate...

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-weight-lifting-fitness-...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/10/16452402/apple-patent-wa...

https://gizmodo.com/5058161/apple-patent-adds-quicklook-capa...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/09/23/apple-cu...

https://www.macstories.net/news/apple-patents-lcd-screen-tha...

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#162

Post by darth_mastah »

Apple cast away Steve Jobs and then came begging for him to come back. He did and steered the company from the verge of collapse to a massive worldwide success. Since SJ passed away, Apple is getting worse each year. I guess this might be Jobs' spirit fading away and people thinking they could do better than him. Clearly, they fall short.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#163

Post by __blockcipher__ »

copperx wrote: post #156
tedivm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.

It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. It's much better to remap Caps Lock to Control (by the way, how do you press Control A and Control E and Control L and Control R hundreds of times a day in bash? By reaching to the far away corner located Control? That's absolute madness). Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now. If you…

Map it to both. Single tap is escape, hold is ctrl.

https://github.com/jasonrudolph/keyboard

It works super well. I can hit key combos that would normally be tricky super easily.

Now if only I could find a way to standardize my hotkeys across sublime, chrome, vim, terminal and tmux. I’ve gotten close but not where I want to. (As an aside, does anyone know how to make ctrl+w delete the word left to the cursor in chrome and put it in the buffer like in the terminal (and also do the same for subl)?)

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#164

Post by __blockcipher__ »

threeseed wrote: post #25
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)

The escape key never disappeared. It’s just a soft key rather than a physical one. I use it hundreds of times a day with vim and have never had problems.

Are you talking about the touchbar esc? Serious question, how the fuck do you use it without tactile feedback?

My approach was to remap caps lock to escape as a press and ctrl as a hold, and then disable the touchbar as much as possible (whoever put unmute and siri next to each other should be taken out and shot btw, that caused me so much annoyance)

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#165

Post by [deleted] »

copperx wrote: post #156
tedivm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.

It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. It's much better to remap Caps Lock to Control (by the way, how do you press Control A and Control E and Control L and Control R hundreds of times a day in bash? By reaching to the far away corner located Control? That's absolute madness). Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now. If you…

[deleted]

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#166

Post by dang »

meritt wrote: post #104
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…

> wow, downvotes? Care to explain...? You were being critical of Apple. That's literally it. You'll notice it comes in waves. Rapid downvotes at first followed by slow and methodical upvotes. That's why you're top now, but it sure as hell took a while, didn't it? The visceral supporters, the shills, and the bots act first. Later, the reasoned adults come in and sometimes adjust things. Read the comments on Microsoft…

This comment breaks the site guidelines in at least two ways, as well as being off topic. Please don't post like this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#167

Post by lou1306 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #4

My too-expensive 2015 MBP has a nonfunctional keyboard. I have to type using external keyboards, which is quite "fun". Apple wants $500. Dragging an old $10 USB keyboard around with you makes you look like you really like mechanical keyboards. It's been about a year and a half now. I guess you get used to it.

My early 2015 13'' MBP had the same problem, which is quite well-documented online. Have you tried replacing the keyboard cable? It's a ~€10 fix (say 20, if you don't have a pentalobe screwdriver) and there are lots of tutorials floating around on the web.

I agree that too-expensive machines shouldn't fail so badly, but so it goes.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#168

Post by smsm42 »

I am not sure what they did, but not only on my new 2016 laptop keyboard felt worse, it also broke around half a year in service (shift key just refused to work. Good think there's two of them, but majorly annoying still). I temporarily went back to a 2013 one and my first thought was "man, the old keyboard feels so much nicer"...

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#169

Post by smsm42 »

designcode wrote: post #72
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…

After using my 2016 MBP for two years, going back to my 2014 MBP just feels wrong. The keyboard is so much better on the modern ones, so I’d recommend giving it a chance !

I switched to 2016 and recently back to 2013 (due to 2016's keyboard being broken) and feel exactly the opposite. I am seriously considering whether migrating back is an option (despite them apparently being binary incompatible so I had to rebuild half of my homebrew to avoid those "illegal instruction" errors). I think Apple is fixing what's not broken, and most likely my next notebook won't be an MBP unless they get their act together quickly (which I don't think is very likely, but I keep an open mind until the time comes).

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#170

Post by smsm42 »

marksi wrote: post #140
blackguardx wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. USB A ports are usually only rated to 1500 insertion cycles because that is what the standard specifies. Micro USB and USB C ports are specced at 10,000 insertion cycles.

I am stunned to hear micro USB is rated for that many insertions. The implementation must not live up to the standard. In my experience, anecdotal, I know, microUSB is the most unreliable of all the USB form factors I've experienced. Bad connectors on cables, and ports that regularly fail internally (not levered off the board.) I have considered replacing ports with miniusb, or a tethered B port because micro has bee…

Yep, had several devices fail because of micro-usb going bad. And the worst part is that since it's how you charge it, there's no option not to use it daily (yeah there's wireless charging standards, but adoption is abysmal so far).
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