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Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

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Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#351

A co-worked of mine convinced the company to buy them a MacBook (the first the company has ever purchased) to replace their aging Dell laptop. They have been doing more and more work on the company's iOS app and the aging Mac mini the company had purchased needed to replaced anyway. After having the laptop for just over a year, they called me upset as the laptop would no longer power on. After some gentle interrogati…

Honestly any Laptop you pay 1200+ on should "survive"(1) you _splashing_ Coffee on it, not just a view drops of liquid. It's totally technical doable in a number of ways and the only thing in its way is because you are fanatic about getting your laptop another mm thinner and/or profit margins.

(1): Survive in the sense that it's in general fine and you at most have to replace some easy to replace not super expensive part. I for example splashed ~1/2L of Orange juice on my Laptop, and it was fine except for the keyboard (due to it being orange juice, water probably would have been fine). Removing the keyboard so that I can continue working with an external one took ~10min for an inexperienced person. And the replacement Keyboard had a price of ~80 Euro with Backlight 40 without, also easy to put back in.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#352

A co-worked of mine convinced the company to buy them a MacBook (the first the company has ever purchased) to replace their aging Dell laptop. They have been doing more and more work on the company's iOS app and the aging Mac mini the company had purchased needed to replaced anyway. After having the laptop for just over a year, they called me upset as the laptop would no longer power on. After some gentle interrogati…

I am sorry for what happened. But I just can't understand people who drink and eat at the same table with electronics. It is hard to happen, but eventually it will and will damage everything, so why doing that, this upsets me when I see people taking risks for nothing. Foods and drinks shouldn't stay outside kitchen.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#353

Not admitting your mistake this much is simply lying. They have a severe honesty problem admitting their hardware faults. How is this legal? Imagine if car companies, instead of recalling their broken shit, just lied and quietly tried to fix it on next year's model... When the free keyboard replacement program shuts down, and Apple still denies the problem, and Apple happily charges you $795 every so often to fix the…

Many poorly designed car parts fail prematurely just outside of warranty. If there's no safety concern, there's no recall.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#354

It’s not just the keyboard, either. I’ve been buying Macs since they switched to Intel in 2006 and the most recent MacBook Pros are the most problematic I’ve ever had. - Bluetooth seems to be fundamentally flawed at a hardware level. AirPods, Plantronics, doesn’t matter. It just randomly connects and disconnects as it pleases. - USB-C dongles are a minefield of poor functionality However, I’ve run Linux off and on si…

> but I just don’t have time to a.) tune and configure it to work and have decent battery life with whatever hardware I choose or b.) troubleshoot it when it randomly decides to break itself on update From my experience, troubleshooting macOS when it randomly decides to break is almost a Windows-like experience - lots of frustration and no sensible help on the internet (unless your problem is so trivial it gets solve…

Yeah, I've had persistent trouble with LaunchServices and nothing I've found on the net helps. All the suggestions are wild shots in the dark.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#355
post #78

15+ years as an Apple user, this is my biggest pet peeve. The other two being: - the touch strip, which I find mostly annoying. I'd prefer physical buttons with the ability to show different labels (a la Optimus keyboard). - whichever idiot thought putting the power plug at the bottom of the Magic Mouse was a good idea.

Dropping the magnetic power cord connector is a major issue for me, but otherwise I wholeheartedly agree.

The cool thing with USB-C on the Pros is you can charge from any of the USB-C plugs, on both sides! On my old Mac the magsafe plug always seemed to be on the wrong side no matter where I seemed to be (Murphy's law). I wore out multiple mag safe cables from being bent too sharply around to the opposite side of the laptop where the nearest plug to my desk, bed, seat in the airport always seemed to be. Then there is the dream, that one day, one day, we might have a single charging cable for all of our devices; laptop, phone, tablet etc. Ironically Apple is the one preventing that day from being a reality right now by hanging on to the lightening connector on the iPhone. I would gladly give up magsafe for USB-C to become the one true connector and charger.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#356

A co-worked of mine convinced the company to buy them a MacBook (the first the company has ever purchased) to replace their aging Dell laptop. They have been doing more and more work on the company's iOS app and the aging Mac mini the company had purchased needed to replaced anyway. After having the laptop for just over a year, they called me upset as the laptop would no longer power on. After some gentle interrogati…

Is it normal for companies to expect employees to pay for accidentally damaged equipment? At everywhere that I've worked, some accidental damage was treated as a cost of doing business, and IT would replace it.

[deleted]

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#357
post #277

I just came back to a MacBook Pro 2018 after several years of experimenting with Windows machines. Based on this thread I am outlier – I enjoy using the trackpad, touch strip, and the keyboard seems fine. In the past five years I have used the following; Thinkpad x230, Thinkpad X1 carbon, Thinkpad x370 yoga, Thinkpad X1 Yoga, Surface Pro 3,4,5, Surface Laptop, Surface Book 1,2, and a hackintosh Thinkpad X230. I was a…

I'm in the same boat as you. I wish my company had issued me the model without the touchbar, as I very much would prefer physical function and esc keys but other than that I love the machine and have never had issues.

The one thing I would change is that I seem to have to reach way over to the right side of the trackpad to get a "right-click".

I also have a ~2016 macbook air and the keyboard SUCKS in comparison to the butterfly keyboard.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in no way defending Apple’s keyboards and there are some real issues with tiny bits of dust completely ruining a keyboard, but normal laptops have always been susceptible to even a little liquid damage. But if your coworker couldn’t just go to his manager, tell them what happened and the company paid for it, that says more about the company.

I know somebody who spilled a whole slurpee into a cheap desktop keyboard once and had it continue working fine. I would pay extra. To have a laptop like that for sure.

A desktop keyboard is a completely different story than a laptop. It can be much thicker and therefore more mechanical than a laptop keyboard.

I don’t need my laptop to be slurpee-proof, and given the trade offs of laptop design I hope it isn’t. I’d think this would add significant heft to the device to be able to guarantee such performance.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is good experience to be able to buy Apple device and be sure that everything there is pretty good. Choosing among thousands of alternatives is pretty frustrating. What brand should I choose? HP, Dell, Lenovo, IBM, Acer, Asus, whatever? I need good display, fast CPU, good battery life, enough RAM. Pretty vague requirements. You are buying Macbook and it's just good, you don't have any regrets, because its CPU is o…

>buy Apple device and be sure that everything there is pretty good. The alternative is that you spend 30 minutes of research and get a superior product cheaper. This isnt an opinion, this is reality. You can find a computer with better specs than Apple, cheaper. I'm not sympathetic to the 'mom' who doesn't know what RAM is, they get penalized by Apple for being an uninformed consumer. Is there any reason for a 'Nerd'…

> spend 30 minutes of research and get a superior product cheaper.

I'll humor you.

dell.com * Choose between home or work → I'll go with work since it's for development * Choose between Latitude, Vostro, Inspiron, Precision, XPS, G Series, Chromebook, and Deals → I'll go with Precision as I'm a professional creator (whatever that means). * Choose between 3000 Series, 5000, or 7000 → I'll take 5000 for the performance * Choose 5520, 5530, or 2-in-1 5530 → umm I'll guess at 5530 because it's a little cheaper * Now it lists 4 actual models I could buy

The comparable mac is 11% more, but if you buy an Office license for Windows and can use Pages/Numbers on a Mac then the price is the same.

The real difference in my opinion is that Apple does a good job of directing you to the right machine, and you know that your purchase will be good. Whereas Dell and others offer a myriad of confusing options (e.g. Inspiron vs Vostro?) and some of those options will be complete crap.

I'm sure I could repeat the process and get a better deal elsewhere but it will certainly take me more than 30 minutes to find it. So, yeh, for price sensitive consumers you can optimize for price. Not all of us 'nerds' prioritize for price however. I work in an office with Dells, Thinkpads, Asus, etc. Some of those machines are complete duds, as well we are starting to cycle out 2 year old laptops because their specs when purchased were crap, while my 2015 mac still outperforms those.

Re: Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

#360

A co-worked of mine convinced the company to buy them a MacBook (the first the company has ever purchased) to replace their aging Dell laptop. They have been doing more and more work on the company's iOS app and the aging Mac mini the company had purchased needed to replaced anyway. After having the laptop for just over a year, they called me upset as the laptop would no longer power on. After some gentle interrogati…

I’m in no way defending Apple’s keyboards and there are some real issues with tiny bits of dust completely ruining a keyboard, but normal laptops have always been susceptible to even a little liquid damage. But if your coworker couldn’t just go to his manager, tell them what happened and the company paid for it, that says more about the company.

A nice exception to that rule were (are?) the HP G series. Similar in class to latitude. A staple of corporate class laptops. Their keyboards are spill proof and have internal drainage channels for coffee not to puddle or get into the internals. I've seen it work a couple times, after a cleanup those Laptops were back at their (messy) user's desks.
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