Apple reckons mystery new material will debug butterfly keyboard woes in latest MacBook Pros Apple has such confidence in the new MacBook Pro's reimagined butterfly mechanism that the laptop qualifies from day one for inclusion in its expansive keyboard repair scheme. The mechanism, introduced in 2015, hasn't gone down well with users who complained of frequent failures – missed keystrokes and double presses of keys …
[You beat me to the "Dear Apple" comment!]
Dear Apple,
Please stop wanking off about how thin you can try to make everything, because nobody really cares, and, as many people will tell you, thicker and better engineered often leads to a much more satisfactory and pleasurable experience.
I was all set to buy the Macbook 12 or the refreshed Airbook 13 that I thought must finally get a 1080p screen.
Instead little Timmy at Apple decided to remove all of the useful ports, get rid of the nice magsafe, put screens I really didn't need in, add hopeless keyboards with terrible feel and put the price up. And still make SSD prices massively expensive.
Then they wonder why I didn't buy a new laptop... too bust building gimmick watches and phone no one can afford and that only work tethered to cluckersome iTunes.
It's hilarious how many people have convinced themselves that the Mac keyboard is actually decent. It's like they've only ever typed on an phone screen before and so find the keyboard novel and marvellous. Meanwhile the professional keyboard nerds who've studied typing will tell you that you need more travel.
I just recently got treated to a ThinkPad X1E. What a marvelous laptop keyboard. It's far superior to anything Apple have ever put out. It's been unfortunate having to switch to Windows 10 but I can't live with a MacBook keyboard. They will have to redesign it completely.
Much to my surprise being an actual "Touch Typist" is a fairly rare ability these days. At work I complained about an interface that couldn't keep up with my typing. I got precious little sympathy because everybody else was doing a copy/paste for 100's of entries.
I learned to type in the 10th Grade. Knowing I'd need to type for college, I signed up for the typing class. Turns out that in those days (the dark ages) the typing class was "female only". Men didn't type! They got their secretaries or their girlfriends or their mom to do it for them. I had to get special permission from the administration to join, and my manhood was often questioned (sometimes with a beating) because I was in a "girls class".
The laugh was on them. I made good money charging $1 a page to type their papers in college.
10th grade? What year is that in metric?
For the record I was taught when I was 7-8 years old in an attempt to help my dyslexia.. And having at least 3mm of a travel is a must for me to be happy with a keyboard. I've still got an old powerMac G5 Bluetooth keyboard in the office for this reason and a cherry Mx blue for home (since the noise that makes would make my presence in the office more annoying than usual).
Funny because I've been typing for many years and I really like the design of the keyboard on the 12" MacBook (mine is thus the first generation butterfly) - I've had zero keyboard faults, and it's by far the keyboard I can type best on.
I've also got a 2018 Macbook Pro (15") which is 3rd gen butterfly I believe. It's not quite as nice - primarily because the keys are further apart on that larger device, but I still don't have any real issues.
The travel is a matter of preference, and I really don't experience the trauma that others do. Perhaps I'm more adaptable to different keyboards as a "professional keyboard nerd" that has to use lots of different computers in my day to day work... who knows.
Whilst it is clear there is a vocal minority that don't like these keyboards, Apple still sells several million laptops a quarter so it doesn't appear to be hurting sales that much.
Now if there is a keyboard to bitch about, that has to be the "magic keyboard" Apple sells - it is garbage. Why don't more people bitch about that??!
Apple sorting out "keyboard woes" ... have they decided to adhere to ISO standards and put the '"' and '@' keys where they are meant to be on UK keyboards? "Experienced" Apple for the first time recently in a new job where they've given me a MacBook Pro instead of a Windows laptop like what I've had everywhere else I've worked .... took about 5 secs of the "setting up your new machine" session with IT before I spotted that they keyboard was wrong ... at least I had a seperate USB keyboard that I'd be using for most of the time ... except that despite telling OSX that it was a "British PC" keyboard it still got the '`' and '\' keys the wrong way round and I had to go to the effort of downloading 3rd party software (Karabiner) to sort this out. Though I've still not managed to work out how to get it to open my "standard" apps (email, browser, vnc session etc) on the same sceen each time I start up or even to keep the 2 additional monitors I use in the same "position" relative to the laptop sceen and don't get me started on having to click on windows to get focus (ok, I know windows does this by default but a quick registry edit fixes that .... with OSX is definitely a case of "our using your mouse wrong") I'd always had the opinion that I chose to avoid Apple products because they were too expensive .... I now realize that it should be "they are crap and too expensive".
The "standard" UK keymap is a complete fucking mess, with many of the symbols needlessly moved to utterly stupid and illogical places. Whoever came up with it should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. (And, sadly, many other national keyboard layouts are just as bad, if not worse ('Allo, AZERTY!))
I actually quite like that Apple tried to unfuck the worst of it (although they lose as many, if not more, points for that stupid "section symbol" key).
To be a happy programmer, just order a US keyboard, define a 'compose' key, and then everything works just beautifully.
You shurely mean: that nice wide finger-friendly US enter key, as opposed to that nasty and thin (on some laptop keyboard designs, genuinely almost unusably so) waffer-thin [sic] vertical Tetris block on "international' keyboards? ;-)
(And you get a proper left shift key, too, instead of the useless runt squeezed out after the extra symbol key has barged its way in, although at least some other laptop manufacturers are starting to see sense/usability now and provide proper shift keys on both sides, with the extra symbol key moved elsewhere (remember: with a sensible keyboard layout, pipe and backslash are on a key next to the square/curly bracket keys, (literally) very handy for programmers.))
You can just remap the keyboard to a different layout.
Mines currently set to 'British PC' since otherwise moving from one to the other would bugger everything up what with muscle memory from touch typing (I also have an AZERTY keyboard layout on my home keyboard since it was a tenth the price of the qwerty layout. Again iso layout muscle memory means it's no problem at all)
Sure, let's argue about placement of symbols on the keyboard instead of arguing about having a keyboard which actually works.
How many years are we into this experiment? Can't Apple just swallow their pride and go back to the pre-2015 design or whenever it was instead of sticking more of Sir Jony's juice on it every year?
That always amazes me with Apple, you pay a superior price for inferior support.
With the iPhone, if it goes wrong, I contact the carrier, they collect the phone, ship it off to an Apple repair facility and a week later, I get the phone back. If an Android phone craps out, I contact the carrier, they collect the phone and drop off a replacement at the same time... But Apple won't let them replace defective phones, so our iPhone users go a week without being able to stay in contact, whilst our Android users lose a maximum of 1 day.
The same with laptops, for less than the price of a MacBook Pro, we get next day, onsite support thrown in with our laptops, whereas the Macs have to be sent back to the repair center for a week. If the Windows devices go down, they are repaired or replaced (if the fix can't be done on site) next day.
Really? Sounds more like a problem with your carrier... I had an issue with my original iPhone 5, popped into an Apple store, 5 mins later I was leaving with a brand new replacement that they gave me.
Bought my first MacBook in 2006 - the last of the 'Black Mac's. Then in 2009 disaster struck and the hard-drive failed, so took it to an Apple Store. Cost £120 to replace and told me it would take 48 hours, when I said I needed it for dj'ing, they turned it around in 24 hours. In 2010 when Apple announced they'd identified a faulty batch of hard-drives from Hitachi I automatically got a refund of the £120 fee.
Never had better service from any company or organisation.
There aren't any Apple Stores in the area. I think the next one is 3 - 5 hour drive away. Which is an improvement, when I got my first iPhone, I would have had to drive 600KM, pass through 5 countries and take a 4 hour ferry journey to get to the nearest Apple Store.
There is the option of paying for Apple Care, which will give you the same swap-out service that all the other manufacturers provide for free.
Apple leading the "thin and bee-yoo-tiful" BS charge continues it's march to maximize early obsolescence for maximum profits. Facing the imminent failure of the BT Airpod v1 batteries, they released v2. The improvement? Same battery with a serviceability rating of 0, zippo, zed, nada, out of 10. So cheaply made of glued together bits that most recyclers won't accept them because it's so difficult just to get the battery out (which MUST be done due to fire hazard while recycling). Way to go you great big multi- billion $ pal.
I'm waiting for Apple to issue their "small number of users excuse"...
"It has come to our attention that A SMALL NUMBER OF USERS have experienced problems with the 2019 butterfly keyboards. Apple engineers have identified that in A SMALL NUMBER OF CASES the keyboard does not behave as expected. In most cases cleaning the keyboard with Apples recommended approach will normally resolve the issue. But in the VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY SMALL NUMBER OF CASES that it doesn't, we recommend you book a Genius Bar appointment for assistance.
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