
Apple acknowledges keyboard problems with recent MacBooks - elorant
https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/27/apple-3rd-gen-butterfly-keyboard-problems/
======
yingw787
I'm pretty sure at this point Apple has lost the trust of the professionals
community. I personally don't think I would ever buy new equipment from Apple
again. At most, I might buy a refurbished iPhone SE downgrading from my iPhone
7 (or spare parts for my iPhone 7) and spare parts for my 2012 non-Retina
MacBook Pro. It's simply not worth upgrading to new Apple equipment unless you
have a lot of spare change burning a hole in your pocket, or you're a
visual/graphic designer and your programs are Apple-specific.

This really should concern Apple. Professionals are the ones requiring the
latest equipment, purchasing the highest-margin products with the highest
price inelasticity (not looking for discounts), the ones most likely to
advertise through word-of-mouth, and the ones contributing the most to brand
value. Apple should only look at how they lost the gaming community back in
the mid-2000s to Windows, and the rise of today's e-sports and streaming
industries led by said professional gamers, to see what kind of impact losing
just one professional community has in terms of opportunity cost.

I doubt Apple could ever be successfully commoditized because of the strength
of their existing moats, but given Apple's discounts of late and inability to
successfully innovate in professional hardware, they're heading more towards
Wal-Mart and less towards Harrods, and that may lead to additional headaches
or intangibles down the line (anti-trust worries, higher support costs and
other operational expenses, decreased customer satisfaction), which all gives
the impression Apple's golden age has come and gone.

~~~
toasterlovin
Look, this keyboard thing is a huge stain on their reputation. But I think you
vastly overestimate all the other vendors in this space.

~~~
yingw787
Oh, don't get me wrong. Apple hardware from 2012-2015 was really great, and I
recently reversed my decision to "upgrade" to a Dell XPS 15 w/ Ubuntu 18.04 in
order to stick to my MacBook because it honestly wasn't an upgrade.

But I think Apple is coasting on its fundamentals and trying to monetize
(cannibalize) a bunch of intangibles that led it to meteoric success in the
first place, and that would worry me as an AAPL shareholder (I'm not one). At
least in the field of package management, Linux is doing some pretty
interesting things; 'snap' is pretty interesting:
[https://snapcraft.io/](https://snapcraft.io/), so are AppImages:
[https://appimage.org/](https://appimage.org/), and this is in addition to the
regular updates to 'apt' or 'yum' that are officially supported by distros.
Meanwhile, 'brew' still dominates the OSX landscape because Apple can't be
bothered to create its own package manager. When was the last time Apple
updated native UNIX-like tooling? I had heard it was around OS X Lion
(basically when Steve Jobs died).

~~~
melling
"Apple hardware from 2012-2015 was really great"

You didn't have your MacBook Pro spontaneously reboot because of the NVIDIA
problem? I don't know if it was the driver or the hardware but it wasn't fun.

~~~
yingw787
Hasn't happened to me. If it did, I might have switched completely already :-)

In fact that was why I returned the XPS 15, the OEM version of Ubuntu 18.04
(which did have correct sleep/hibernate behavior and worked well with the OEM
battery) couldn't detect the NVIDIA Quadro P2000 card at all, which I wanted
to run CUDA with. That persisted after about three factory resets, so I was
like kthxbai.

~~~
m_mueller
This sort of thing is why I've resigned to just use WSL (after switching from
Mac). Works well enough.

------
yazaddaruvala
The 2012/13 MacBook Pros are still the pinnacle of laptop design.

7 years later I’m still using them (work and personal) with no issues or
battery life problems (original battery). The keyboard feels good, the
trackpad is amazing, I love the MagSafe charger, and a decent screen.

Upgrade the internals, give me a better screen, and if there is space a bigger
battery all in the same form factor and as a professional it would be a no
brainer purchase.

They can feel free to experiment/innovate with the MacBook and MacBook Air
lines of laptops. But the MacBook Pro should utilize tried and true technology
that has been successful on a different MacBook line for a few years.

~~~
kalleboo
> They can feel free to experiment/innovate with the MacBook and MacBook Air
> lines of laptops. But the MacBook Pro should utilize tried and true
> technology that has been successful on a different MacBook line for a few
> years.

This is what gets me. Yes I get Apple wants to make a super sleek ultra-thin
machine. But that's what the "Air" brand is for! In a Pro line you can
sacrifice some weight and thickness. It's not as if the Apple of today even
cares about SKU bloat anymore.

My pet peeve with the MacBook Pros is the thermal throttling. I run into this
ALL THE TIME, and I'm not even that heavy of a user. Start doing anything
slightly taxing when charging the battery from zero in a room that's over 25 C
("summer") and the heat from the charging will kick it into throttle-o-rama.

Second pet peeve is battery life. They cut down the battery life from the FAA
maximum on the recent generations because hey, "safari web browsing and Pages
productivity hits our 10 hour goal". That doesn't help me compiling shit in
Xcode! I recently bought an old PowerBook G3 to play with MacOS 9 and that
thing almost gets the same 4 hour battery life my MBP 2017 does on a 20 year
old New Old Stock battery.

~~~
yazaddaruvala
Lol yeah Xcode or IntelliJ kill batteries. I’m ok with that tho batteries are
for meetings and such.

I agree about thermals. Better venting should be a priority! That is one thing
they should improve on the 2012 MacBook Pro form factor.

------
ggm
Given the amount of cash on-hand, and the historical importance of the coding
community to the status of Mac, let alone the guts of the OS (it, like almost
all product in this space routinely uses free, semi-free, community-involved
software elements. I know Apple 'give back' like they did for the FreeBSD
community but its a give-take relationship and I think we can all relate to
the huge amount of take in deciding to run a UNIX os instead of the homebrew
p-system)

I find it slightly odd that the 'money men' would risk the brand value by not
gold-plating the apology. Every mac owner should have been sent a willy-wonka
ticket good for a replacement in a macstore and the macstore guru's should
have been shipped almost infinite supply of replacements.

When Apple stuffed up the powerplug, the regulator forced them to fix it for
free, for almost any walk-up. They can do this when made to do it.

The point is: A Rolls-Royce brand would _want_ to do this unforced. _I 'm
sorry sir, the walnut burr finish is not up to standard and we have scheduled
three appointment slots of your choice to pick from, to replace it, and a free
1000km full service and valet to apologize_ is how you make ex-mac fanatics
turn into glued-on-for-life fanatics.

Cheap at the price. Chump change on the bottom line.

Instead? we get nickel-and-dime treatment. Deny, Delay, Obfuscate.

------
VWWHFSfQ
I've been using Macs my whole life and this latest generation of MacBooks and
MacBook Pros are by far the worst I've ever used at pretty much everything

~~~
te_chris
That is just not true. I bought one and I have a thin laptop which runs OS X
and has 32gb of RAM, 1TB SSD and 6 Core i9. Mostly use it for music production
and it's genuinely incredible. I can work wherever I am, with a full
complement of sample libraries, and never worry about computaion resources.
It's a wonder machine.

~~~
simonh
I don't think anyone is seriously complaining about the performance, but the
user experience seems to vary a lot. Some people love the feel of new
keyboards, others hate them; some have no mechanical problems with them, for
others they're unusable broken[0]; some like the touch bar, others feel
lobotomised without a physical Escape key.

I think the feel thing is arguable and the touchbar is a matter of taste.
Apple has to look at the market as a whole to see what works for the whole
customer base, and the fact is a lot of people who don't post on HN hate
function keys because they can never remember which does what.

The mechanical issues are really not acceptable though. It just affects too
many machines too consistently. Even if yours is fine now, it could have an
issue at any moment. They need to bite a Mac Pro sized bullet and fix this
properly.

[0][https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-
mac...](https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-macbook-
keyboard-problem/)

~~~
arebours
> I don't think anyone is seriously complaining about the performance [...]

Well, I do. It's not even that it's pretty pricey for what's inside. The lone
fact that you can't get a macOS laptop with a better CPU or battery life than
what it's offered with a maxed out MacBook Pro is a joke.

~~~
simonh
Those 6-core 8th gen Core i9s just not scratching your itch then.

~~~
arebours
Ah, it seems you're right. I've never considered buying 15-inch laptop and I
think this is where I got this misconception from.

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matthewmacleod
What I find weird is that I used a 2017 model for a year and didn't have a
single issue issue with the keyboard — and I love the feel of it.

But I bought one of the new 2018 models, and I have recently developed a
sporadically repeating key or two, which is driving me up the wall. It's a
real shame, because _everything else_ about the machine is amazing. And now
I'm soon going to have to take it back and get it fixed – because it doesn't
seem reasonable that a £3000 machine should have any issues of this sort.

~~~
Mindwipe
It's not especially weird that you got lucky with your 2017 model for a year.

There are people who didn't have issues with the Samsung Note 7, but I think
we all agree that there was a problem.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Oh yeah, for sure. I guess I heard _a lot_ about the issue when it was being
discussed the first time round, and I figured it was a bit overblown because I
hadn't experienced anything – then within a couple of months of owning one of
the newer, better models, it's happened a couple of times. It's obviously just
luck :)

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MattyMc
My employee returned his first laptop because of this issue, and now his
replacement laptop is having the exact same problem.

He's 2/2 with this issue. The statistical likelihood of that if the issue only
affects a small percentage of laptops is very low.

~~~
hopler
The likelihood is modulated by the level of dust and Cheetos in the operating
environment.

~~~
kalleboo
If a keyboard can't handle "dust" then it's not a Pro keyboard. My MacBook Pro
Retina 2012 traveled the world in all kinds of challenging outdoor
environments and as long as liquid didn't go into the keyboard there was no
worry.

I've always adored the MacBook Pro line since they were so solidly built. I've
dropped a pre-unibody model where it got it a big dent in the chassis but it
kept on trucking for years. Quality like that is worth paying for. "Keep away
from dust" is not worth $3000.

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jacknews

      Companies like iFixit and Simple Mac might disagree.
      They believe the butterfly keyboard system
      (which allows for very thin yet stable keys)
      is inherently fragile
    

It's even worse than that, the keyboard is inherently uncomfortable and noisy.

All that pain for negative gain.

------
kevinherron
I wonder if there can even be a "repair" program until they have a new
generation with a new keyboard out to just offer a replacement with.

FWIW, I had a 2016 that had no issues until a key suddenly fell off. I now
have a 2018 i9 that has no issues. I actually prefer this keyboard to the
2012-2015 keyboards but it's a shame about the reliability issues.

~~~
Spartan-S63
I had a 2016 laptop and the only keyboard issue I had was caused by a repair.
I took it back to the Apple Store and they replaced it with a similarly
upgraded mid 2017 MacBook Pro, no questions asked.

I, too, like this keyboard over the old one. There seems to be less key-wobble
and it feels way less mushy. That's my biggest criticism with the old MacBook
Pros. The keyboard was too mushy.

~~~
kalleboo
I wish I had an Apple store nearby. Instead I have to take to an Apple
Authorized Repair center, have them mail it off to Apple, turns out they
forgot to report one of the issues, have them mail it off again and then a
month later I get my machine back, and it turns out it's still not fixed.

~~~
Spartan-S63
That's a really unfortunate service experience.

The two times I've had to send my laptop in, it was overnighted to Apple,
fixed in a day, and overnighted back. The third time that I went to an Apple
store, they did a same-day return and replace for a year-old Late 2016 MacBook
Pro.

------
throw03172019
I laughed when I read Apple said, “a small amount of users” are having issues
with the keyboard.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
“a small amount of users” is almost verbatim what they use every time. And
it's true... for some definition of small.

~~~
selectodude
"Compared to the number of iPhones we sold this year, a small number of
MacBook Pro users have bad keyboards"

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musicale
My keyboard has already been replaced once. But the main problem is that it's
terrible to type on because of the almost nonexistent key travel. It is the
worst keyboard I've ever used on an Apple laptop.

(Oh, and the trackpad palm rejection has never worked properly the way it used
to on older models, instead causing the cursor to jump around randomly when
you type; software settings don't help at all, in spite of many condescending
comments on the internets. Faulty or nonexistent palm rejection is a widely
reported issue that there is no reliable fix for, aside from using an external
trackpad or mouse. It really is the worst trackpad I've ever had the
misfortune of using.)

------
eeeeeeeeeeeee
I can’t believe Apple has not yet pulled this ludicrously stupid keyboard
design.

I bought a 2016 MBP and it was defective the day I bought it. Swapped it out
for a new one and that one experienced the issue within a few months. Had it
repaired. Now it’s doing it again.

I have a 2017 MBP for work. Same issue about a year into usage. All my
coworkers have had the exact problem with theirs.

Go into any Apple Store and you’ll likely see multiple “geniuses” using
compressed air on these machines to “fix” the issue.

I won’t be buying another Mac portable computer until they actually admit and
address this stupid keyboard design.

------
villgax
Razer Blade 15 for me now from my Air instead of a future Pro

~~~
xiphias2
How do you like it? I'm just changing from LG Gram to Razer Blade 15 Advanced
to have more power for programming (and have CUDA programming capabilities),
but I don't have the laptop on my hands yet.

~~~
villgax
The shift key placement is the only crib. Everything else is good, no give in
the body. Bigger battery than base model, TheUnlocker on YouTube also did a
comprehensive battery life test is various modes & turns out the Battery saver
one actually performs on par yet delivers 7-8 hours of work.

Even I got it for the CUDA compute.

------
Mindwipe
I've had the entire bottom half of my Macbook replaced twice and a total
replacement in the last few years. And the user experience of typing on it is
absolutely disgusting.

I'll never buy another Apple machine with the butterfly keyboard. MacOS isn't
worth it. And the lack of synergy means I'd probably drop my desktop Mac too.
I could finally get something with some graphics grunt.

I really hope Apple realises this keyboard design has to go. Now.

~~~
musicale
It is truly terrible. A thicker laptop with a better keyboard would be vastly
superior.

Oh and with trackpad palm rejection that actually works properly.

------
js2
This is re-reporting of the WSJ piece discussed here yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19501341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19501341)

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trts
Got one for work, along with an assortment of dongles. Mainly it was the
keyboard that caused me to swap for a PC after three weeks. I still look at my
coworker's screens with envy.

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reasonablemann
3 years of this nonsense. Release a new chassis already.

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djbelieny
I loved Apple and their products but a series of things made me move away from
it. I am now very happy with a much more powerful Lenovo Yoga 730-15 (i7
8Cores + 24Gb-Ram + 1tb SSD) and my new Samsung S10. Until Apple remains just
one more in the pack and not the powerhouse in support, design and usability
it used to be, I'll stick with Lenovo and Samsung. Farewell Apple, it's been
real...

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wumms
[https://outline.com/dr8wpv](https://outline.com/dr8wpv) (I could not get past
engadget's/ Oath's wall of option management)

