Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

ifixit.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–186 of 186 posts

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#181

Post by copperx »

cerberusss wrote: post #179
copperx wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now Couterpoint: when I was working at Lucent around 1999, they gave me a Sun workstation with a keyboard that had Esc instead of Caps Lock. There were others that had a Control key there, though. Edit: I'm searching online and can't find a Sun keyboard with that layout. Now I'm wondering if I misremembered...

That's interesting. All the Sun keyboards that I have seen have the control key in the place of the caps lock key. I do know that some had the Esc key closer to the home row (back-tick position, I believe).

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#182

Post by sillysaurus3 »

nicolas_t wrote: post #124
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.

There's a way to pay a lot less. Ask apple to replace the battery, it costs $219 and because they have to replace the topcase when replacing the battery, you will get a new keyboard. I was in the same situation and Apple also quoted me $500 until I asked to replace the battery.

This is an awesome tip. Thanks for the ray of hope. I'll look into it.

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#183

Post by runeks »

achompas wrote: post #84
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…

> Was anyone ever legitimately inconvenienced by the thickness of the 2010 MBP? My tinfoil hat theory is yes - Apple's supply chain folks. Thinner and lighter laptops means more fit on a cargo airplane, which means lower shipping costs. Tim Cook cut his teeth on Apple's supply chain as COO before becoming CEO, after all.

> My tinfoil hat theory is yes [...]

We don't need to speculate. How many MBPs fit in a cubic meter, and how much does it cost to ship a cubic meter of goods on a cargo plane?

According to this[1], flying a 40-foot container from Shenzen to London is around $2000. A 40-foot container has a capacity of 76 cubic meters.

The MBP fits in a 17” x 13” x 5” shipping box[2], which leaves some room for bubble wrap. That's 0.02 cubic meters, so 50 MBPs per cubic meter. So for $2000, 50*76 = 3800 MBPs can be shipped.

That's around 50 cents shipping cost, for something that sells for $1000, which means Tim Cook would have to be quite irrational to reduce the size of the MBP in order to reduce the (50-cent-per-MBP) freight expenditure.

[1] https://www.freightos.com/freight-resources/air-freight-rate...

[2] https://swappa.com/blog/the-best-way-to-ship-your-macbook/

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#184

Post by [deleted] »

runeks wrote: post #183
achompas wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was anyone ever legitimately inconvenienced by the thickness of the 2010 MBP? My tinfoil hat theory is yes - Apple's supply chain folks. Thinner and lighter laptops means more fit on a cargo airplane, which means lower shipping costs. Tim Cook cut his teeth on Apple's supply chain as COO before becoming CEO, after all.

> My tinfoil hat theory is yes [...] We don't need to speculate. How many MBPs fit in a cubic meter, and how much does it cost to ship a cubic meter of goods on a cargo plane? According to this[1], flying a 40-foot container from Shenzen to London is around $2000. A 40-foot container has a capacity of 76 cubic meters. The MBP fits in a 17” x 13” x 5” shipping box[2], which leaves some room for bubble wrap. That's 0.0…

[deleted]

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#185

Post by proto-n »

userbinator wrote: post #157
davnn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from a MBP to a Lenovo X1 Carbon and the keyboard is so much better on the X1, it’s on another level. Lost macOS though, which, in the end, didn’t matter as much as I thought it would.

Lost macOS though, which, in the end, didn’t matter as much as I thought it would. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/99-perfect-sierra-10-12-6... Or you could run it in a VM. I had to test something with macOS not long ago (not a regular Mac user) and was pleasantly surprised when, after doing a small amount of configuration, VirtualBox booted up from the ISO and installed a macOS VM that ran pretty much perfectly.

No hardware accelerated graphics in the vm though for mac os afaik, which can be painful even if you try and turn off most animations. No?

Re: The Great Apple Keyboard Cover-Up

#186

Post by wudu »

sjwright wrote: post #134
tedivm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And to be fair to Apple, they make this remapping super-easy to do. No hacks, weirdness or third party tools are required.

Only if you want to remap to Esc. My preference is to set it as Delete. That I can not do w/o 3rd party apps.
Post reply on HN