The niche is not developers themselves; the niche is a (vocal) sample of the developer community. I'm a developer and I like the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard with touchbar.
In particular:
What we want is a functional keyboard.
This is your opinion, but it's not necessarily the majority opinion. For example, I would rather Apple focus on other parts of the computer than the keyboard. The keyboard just isn't that meaningful to me, and I'm just as productive a developer without whatever platonic ideal of a keyboard Apple could put on the thing.
I think a lot of people vastly overestimate the number of Apple customers who have an opinion about this, because it's relatively easy to see complaints on HN, blogs or tech journalism.
I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the size of the problem with the keyboard. Apple has had atleast three class action lawsuits regarding the defective keyboards. They have setup a warranty program to try and placate consumers and resolve the lawsuits. It's a real problem and just because it did not impact you does not mean that millions of others have not been impacted. So here we are, I'm a developer of 1 and have been impacted you're a developer of 1 and have not been impacted. It doesn't make yours or my experience any less real but I think the class action lawsuits speak for themselves. For me personally, it's hard to write a lot of code when keys don't hit or they endlessly repeat. So, I picked up a Lenovo and through Linux on it and ditched the MBP.
I honestly don't know how any of the other market shares can put up with this failing keyboard either. For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.
> It's a real problem and just because it did not impact you does not mean that millions of others have not been impacted.
This is a good point, which I acknowledge. Maybe I've been lucky with my keyboard. But while you point this out, I think most folks complaining about the keyboard are not acknowledging the other side - that it may not be as important as they think it is either. Hence my original comment indicating my own opinion.
> For students, teachers, scientists .. any one that uses a keyboard frequently... it would have to be real hard to write a paper with keys that fail or keys that start repeating constantly.
For what it's worth, I wrote a ~170 page paper (in LaTeX) on a 2016 MacBook Pro. I cared a lot more about screen real estate than the keyboard, so I added a few monitors. All anyone seems to be able to provide is an exchange of anecdotal evidence for or against the keyboard. If there's a real issue I'm not defending it. But I am saying it might not be worth it for Apple to fix it depending on incidence rate, and it might not be as prevalent as the tech blogging/journalism sphere would have us believe.
Actually it is more widespread than the blogging would have you believe as most people don't blog. They just take the computer in and pay for it to be fixed and go back to life.
If your keyboard ever breaks and you find yourself unable to type, then you will discover why people with defective keyboards think its super important. Until then you can minimize the impact it has on people all day long as they cannot type properly without an external keyboard. I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...
You're not discussing this in good faith, and I don't understand why you feel the need to be passive aggressive in response to my comments. You also seem to be almost willfully misreading what I'm saying.
To make this particular point painfully clear, I didn't postulate the problem is not widespread because literally only bloggers have the problem, and there are relatively few bloggers. My postulate was that the problem seems more widespread than it is due to the magnifying effect journalism and blogging has. If you disagree then critique the point I made, not the contrived false equivalence you seem to think I made.
Other than that yes, I've had a broken keyboard on a laptop, and no, I'm not minimizing anything. Devil's advocacy and a request for some quantitative evidence (which was elsewhere provided, and to which I conceded) does not constitute minimization or dismissal of a problem. This especially:
> I'm sure Apple recalled the keyboard because there was nothing wrong and some bloggers went crazy...
is a false dichotomy, and one which I did not make.
> because literally only bloggers have the problem
It could be the ambiguous way you've phrased this, but if I'm reading this right, then that's what you're not getting: a lot of people actually do have this problem. Not just bloggers.
I don't think we have enough information to know whether or not "millions were affected." Neither class-action lawsuits nor a warranty program nor complaints on Hacker News prove this one way or the other.
Sorry, I was spouting hyperbole to counter-act hyperbole. You're right, that is not helpful, I agree. As someone says below: Only Apple can conclusively provide the numbers and they have no desire to do so. So, everyones opinion is just that. Anecdotal and an opinion because _no one_ can back up their claims. I'll take my statement back though, because it's not useful to fight hyperbole with hyperbole. What I can say is, I was impacted twice and I have since switched vendors.
I strongly disagree with you that I was being hyperbolic. In fact, my comment (the one you responded to) did not quantify anything, much less in a hyperbolic way. I expressed an opinion. As it stands, your comment is a pretty passive aggressive way to withdraw a statement.
> I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the size of the problem with the keyboard.
Actually the opposite is true.
Apple itself has said it is a tiny, tiny percentage of users. If they were to lie about this then it would be an SEC violation since they would be lying to markets about potential impact of replacements/lawsuits.
Wanting a functional keyboard on a laptop is a niche opinion? Wowwwwww. The reality distortion field is strong.
I've used every MacBook model and the new ones have unacceptably bad keyboards. I am in an office with dozens of broken ones and the things have become a joke amongst the developers. The IT department got so tired of Apple's time to repair them that they started just ordering extra keys from third party websites for $20/each.
I worked at Apple with Steve Jobs and I can assure you he would not say that the keyboard isn't meaningful and its fine if its broken. There is a reason all the major Apple bloggers have written piece after piece about their poor reliability and repairability. If your space bar breaks with one piece of dust you need to replace the entire top of the computer including the battery since its glued to it.
> Wanting a functional keyboard on a laptop is a niche opinion? Wowwwwww. The reality distortion field is strong.
This is a deliberate misreading of what I said. My point is that reasonable people can disagree about what a "functional keyboard" is for software development. You're free to disagree with me, but don't accuse me of being under a "reality distortion field." And for what it's worth, the comment of mine that you responded to is talking about design and aesthetic choices. You're primarily talking about hardware faults and reliability.
The source comment was not about design and aesthetic choices. Here is the first comment that you responded to: “What we want is a functional keyboard”
We want a functional keyboard. This is not about reasonable people disagreeing. If your space bar does not work, your keyboard is broken and typing sucks.
So I use a lot of different keyboards - my main ones are a whitefox with blue switches and a CODE with greens. I actually like the MBP keyboard - key stability and clickiness are the parameters I like, and the MBP has both.
My problem with the keyboard is just reliability - I now keep a can of compressed air at my desk just because a key is going to get screwed up at least once a month. And I have one key that is particularly bad, so I assume some piece of dust is just trapped under the key and the compressed air pushes it somewhere until it eventually falls back into place. I'm waiting a little longer to bring it in for repair in hopes that they start using this new v3 keyboard as a replacement - maybe it secretly fixes the dust issue (And they don't want to say it because that would be admitting that there was a problem.)
mainly interested in this news to learn if they'll start exchanging 2016/17 mbps for this new model.
Does the new keyboard require dozens of tiny screws to assemble/dissemble?
I may be wrong but I was under the impression the difficulty in replacing the keyboard is due to it being fused to the battery. You pretty much have to replace both when attempting to replace one or the other.
Yeah, that is the issue. A keyboard replacement means replacing both battery and keyboard because they are glued together.
But I have heard that they were replacing older keyboards (2016) with 2017 models (You could easily tell because they add new symbols above control/option.) I wonder if they'll be doing replacements with 2018 keys now. It would be really nice - the keyboard reliability is pretty much my only complaint, minus not having a physical escape key.
I assume Apple is a rational organization equipped with a better understanding than I have of its products. I know - big assumption - but let's assume it's true. What reasons would Apple as a company have for improving the keyboard, and what reasons would Apple have for not improving the keyboard?
No company is perfectly rational. Apple have built their empire on doing things that run counter to the received wisdom of the industry, things that many analysts and competitors saw as deeply irrational.
Personally, I think that the loss of Jobs has created a serious leadership problem, because so much of the company's direction was led by the personal taste of one man. Apple has retained the institutional knowledge and habits accrued during that era, but it hasn't found a satisfactory replacement for the functions that Jobs performed. It has retained an obsessive focus, but it has lost the compass that guided that focus towards the user experience. They know how to do thinner, lighter, fewer ports and so they keep doing it, but there's no why. So many aspects of Apple's corporate culture are uniquely ritualistic, but the meaning of those rituals died with Jobs.
I didn't want to be this explicit with my point because I think it's patronizing. But your comment isn't responding to what I intended to say, so here it is. I'm not talking about ideological design mandates and I'm not talking about perfect rationality. I'm talking about charitable estimation of competency and an assumption of baseline rationality.
Apple is one of the most valuable and critically examined companies in the world, with 125,000 employees and end-to-end vertical integration across its hardware and software development process. In consideration of feedback from design decisions, like choosing to develop progressively thinner products, removing physical function keys and implementing touchbars, why would Apple make those decisions? More importantly, why would Apple double down on these decisions in a line refresh of the product 18 months after the initial launch? Presumably Apple is well aware of the number of developers who use their machines, and presumably Apple is aware of developer feedback (again: basic competency as an organization).
So let's reframe this question as follows: why would Apple, with all its resources and talent for research and development, choose to double down on a controversial design mandate instead of rolling back the keyboard to the version most widely praised? A very reasonable answer is that customers in the aggregate - developers included - don't care that much about the touchbar or the virtual function keys, and will continue to buy the products.
Regardless of my own opinion about the keyboard design, I try to approach this from the perspective that as a single individual with vastly fewer resources than Apple, I likely have a fundamentally less perfect understanding of Apple's product goals, customer demographic and design initiatives. So if I see an incongruence that seems to have a simple answer ("Why doesn't Apple just do the thing everyone clearly wants"), my instinct is that my priors are incorrect and/or it's actually not simple at all.
>why would Apple, with all its resources and talent for research and development, choose to double down on a controversial design mandate instead of rolling back the keyboard to the version most widely praised?
Because their approach to design is completely unique. Their industrial design studio is small, insular and incredibly secretive. That studio has almost complete independence; most Apple employees won't see a new product until the design is finalised and ready for launch. They have an overt belief in the wisdom of ignoring user feedback and media criticism, going back to the original Macintosh. They don't think that their role is to provide people with what they want, but what they should want.
That approach is one of Apple's greatest assets. They were right to ignore the people who said that a computer needed serial ports and a floppy disk drive. They were right to ignore the people who said that a phone needed buttons. They're willing to ignore conventional wisdom and the demands of the market in favour of a singular design vision for what technology should be. They're willing to tell their customers trust us, this is for the best. That approach is necessary if you're going to be a highly innovative company that creates entire new categories of product, but it's not right 100% of the time and it can be infuriatingly stubborn.
The strain relief on the MagSafe connector was too short. Any cable manufacturer would tell you that it was too short. Any electrical engineer would tell you that it was too short. The internet was full of pictures of frayed (and sometimes charred) MagSafe cables. The Apple store website was full of one-star reviews for MagSafe power adaptors that had frayed. Apple did nothing for over five years until a class action forced their hand; they offered replacements, but didn't fix the defect.
Your charitable estimation of Apple's competency and baseline rationality is a reasonable one and absolutely could be correct, and I agree it would follow that your priors are incorrect and/or it's actually not simple at all.
But I find jdietrich's argument totally plausible. They could have tons of negative user feedback that they ignored. "They" probably being a handful of designers (so the total number of talented people at Apple is basically irrelevant). Apple's always had a certain arrogance. They (believe they) know what customers want better than their customers do: in this case a thinner and thinner laptop. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they lose their way and I end up with a really expensive MacBook Pro that I hate typing on.
I've certainly seen a few cases inside Google where a small team ignored dogfood feedback from other Googlers ("you aren't the user", basically), then were shocked when they got the same feedback from real users. It's absolutely possible for a small number of people inside a giant organization to make decisions that later bite them. I don't have any particular reason to believe Apple's immune to this.
Apple has built a substantial quality lead over competitors, over the years. That gives them a lot of room to make mistakes (like removing a useful key from the keyboard) while maintaining sales. That doesn't mean every decision they make is perfect.
Think of the thickness thing - Apple made billions of dollars before it wasn't even possible to make razor thin laptops. Is razor-thinness, to the point of losing port connectivity in a Pro device, really necessary or optimal?
This is a great question, but many people seem to have already decided that Apple is personally out to sell worse computers because they can, or something.
It's worth noting that they did change the keyboard on these new models, and I would guess they did so to avoid extending their special keyboard replacement program they have fro the current one.
Apple doesn't care because people (including myself) will continue to throw money at them even if they make something that sucks. All of their competitors' laptops simply suck more. Freed from market pressures, Apple's hardware designers have free reign to pursue form over function, a dream situation for any designer to be in.
To answer your question, it is because Apple is an example of a company where the design people have run amok.
They don't want to improve the keyboard, because it would make the laptop slightly less thin, and the people with the power, (the design department) don't want that.
Just because Apple has lots of people working there, doesn't mean that the RIGHT people are in charge.
No company is perfect. And although apples religious focus on design has helped it in the past, this time it seems to have hurt thebl company.
And maybe they will learn from their mistakes or maybe they wont.
>> I assume Apple is a rational organization equipped with a better understanding than I have of its products. I know - big assumption - but let's assume it's true. What reasons would Apple as a company have for improving the keyboard, and what reasons would Apple have for not improving the keyboard?
Your question has already been answered by Apple with the current generation of problematic keyboards.
They already had a mature, reliable keyboard that felt pretty good and was not noisy. It was not "broke" and did not need "fixing".
They presumably chose to "improve" it with the current one so that their computers could be a little bit thinner and that Jony Ive could brag about the new technology in a video during a keynote.
It could be that the keyboard is actually amazing, that the concerns are overblown, and that the engineers, developers, journalists, and consumers that have been complaining about it are either lying for some reason or lack the perspective to realize what is and isn't important to their workflow.
It could be that it would be a huge public image loss to admit that they were wrong about this. No matter how Apple phrases it, it's always look bad to say "we've spent the last 2-3 years telling you this was a technical achievement, turns out we were wrong." One of Apple's biggest marketing angles is "we put the work in and get it right the first time." That's going to be something that people mock them over, regardless of whether or not it's the right decision to make.
It also might open the floodgates on more expensive litigation and warranty requirements in the future. Apple's current warranty that they just rolled out is only valid up to 3 years after the initial purchase. Is a judge more likely to force them to extend it if a lawyer can argue in court "they lacked so much confidence that they reverted their own design?" Are their significant investments into blocking Right to Repair going to be hampered by that kind of public admission?
They've also invested large amounts of money into the current manufacturing process and design. Their recent decision to discontinue the 2015 model might point to this being about manufacturing costs - you could ask the same question of that decision: "why not allow the holdouts to keep purchasing the older model?"
Along with that, it could also be sunk-cost fallacy at play. One way to check if Apple has a problem with sunk-cost is to look back in the past to see if they've exhibited a pattern of doubling down on controversial decisions and rejecting criticism or blaming customers for issues.
It also could just be that the keyboard looks sexier in advertisements, and perhaps Apple optimizes for advertisements over extended customer experience because they have enough built up goodwill and reputation to do so. The devices might sell better right now when marketed as futuristic status symbols, rather than as practical machines.
Finally, don't dismiss the idea that it could just be the result of designers and engineers running wild without enough practical input to reign them in. I'm all for giving companies the benefit of the doubt, and I understand what you're getting at. But you should apply your philosophy in moderation or else someday you'll find yourself defending Microsoft Bob. Companies are made of people after all.
Doesn't matter. The crappier keyboard is probably .014mm thinner, which supersedes all other considerations because producing thinner hardware is really really REALLY important to apple.
That's ridiculous. The keyboard is probably the most important feature for someone who codes. You're basically saying, "Whatever Apple sells I will buy, regardless of its qualities." That strikes me as a strange stance to take.
I think what OP is saying is: I'm not picky about the keyboard. I can relate -- I actually prefer the new keyboard -- but also still like the old one (my work laptop), as well as two other external keyboards I switch between (a mechanical keyboard and another wireless keyboard). There's keyboards out there I don't like -- but there's plenty more that I do. So I think overall, Macbook could probably ship with any of these keyboards and it wouldn't be a factor affecting my purchasing decision. That's probably what OP means.
You act as though I said I wanted to use something outlandish as a keyboard, like a reprogrammed toaster. The MacBook Pro is a qwerty keyboard. It doesn't have the full function row or numpad, yes, but it's fundamentally a usable keyboard.
I'm not "basically saying whatever Apple sells I will buy", and to think that would indicate you have an unrealistically uncharitable interpretation of my comment. In fact, I explicitly stated elsewhere in this thread that screen real estate matters to me.
If you feel strongly about the keyboard, that's fine. But that's not intrinsic to your capacity as a developer, it's just your opinion about its suitability for your purpose. Reasonable people can disagree over the importance of a keyboard.
There's a fundamental difference between a keyboard whose feel I might not like (travel distance, click feel) and a keyboard which has been reported to fail catastrophically from the smallest bits of dust.
If Apple decided to go for a chiclet, or other variety of keyboard, I probably wouldn't care. I'd deal with that. In this case, though, I pretty much have to expect (based on news and class action lawsuits) that it will stop working correctly, in a matter of months, in a way which directly impacts my productivity. I'll use one at work if I have to, but there's no way I'd buy one for home while the keyboard is that unreliable.
To be clear, I'm talking about the design of the thing here. There are two different conversations being had - one is about a dislike of the design, the other is about the hardware reliability of the thing.
>> it's just your opinion about its suitability for your purpose. Reasonable people can disagree over the importance of a keyboard.
I find that people who take themselves very seriously tend to project their preferences on others.
As it relates to laptops for developers-- not agreeing on things like keyboards, matte screens, aspect ratios, touchscreens, etc. - that can elicit very strong absolutist responses from them.
>> That's ridiculous. The keyboard is probably the most important feature for someone who codes.
This is true, but not everyone is picky about keyboards.
I started using mechanicals in the 80s, and I know a lot of people think it's the only way to type, but I actually don't like mechanicals any more.
Today, I use a dome keyboard (shudder!) as my daily driver and I can adapt to most keyboards, regardless of feel.
So while I get what you're saying, the OP is probably implying that he/she can adapt to different keyboard types -- as such keyboard type is not a meaningful selection criterion for him/her.
The only time I ever use a laptop keyboard directly is when I'm on a plane. I travel with an external keyboard and mouse. This is partially for ergonomic reasons, and partially preference. I like having a larger keyboard and full numberpad. So I agree with this comment completely. The keyboard would never be a factor in purchase for me.
Sure, that would be shitty. But do we have an authoritative and empirical source indicating a meaningful increase in keyboard hardware problems?
When I search for information about this, I come up with articles like [1]. But none of the data is provided and the analysis isn't exactly...rigorous, to put it charitably.
EDIT: Why in the world has this been downvoted to -3?! This is a reasonable comment to make complete with an example. If you disagree, blindly downvoting isn't informative of anything except that you don't like a comment.
Okay, that's fair. It looks like it goes beyond the tech reporting bubble then. Thanks for being the only one to provide a cited source in response to my own.
I'll concede that the hardware flaws - independent of personal taste about the touchbar or function keys - is a major problem then.
The only people that could conclusively provide that information is Apple, and they have no desire to do so. So all we have to go on is anecdata. My personal experiences suggest that the keyboard is problem is widespread, though by no means common.
The fact that Apple has made a keyboard repair program available indicates just how bad this is directly. We don't have numbers, no, but it's pretty obvious it's not just a small number of users experiencing this given their response.
You can walk into any Best Buy or other non-Apple retail location that sells Apple computers and find at least one machine with keyboard issues. The most common one I've found is a left shift key that doesn't work unless you press it exactly in the center or with excessive force.
Add me to the list of people who don't give a crap about the keyboard, so long as it's functional. The #1 thing I was looking for when I opened the page was...
"how many relevant ports does it have? will I have to carry around a dongle to do the same things I can do on my 2015 MBP without a dongle? oh wait.. nope still need dongles."
And then "Wait why is the 13 inch form factor not even getting discrete graphics processing, nor up to 32GB ram?"
A dysfunctional keyboard is a no-no, because I need a functional keyboard. But in general I'm not bothered at all about the other things that are important to other people, such as key travel, etc. So I haven't been vocal about it.
In particular:
What we want is a functional keyboard.
This is your opinion, but it's not necessarily the majority opinion. For example, I would rather Apple focus on other parts of the computer than the keyboard. The keyboard just isn't that meaningful to me, and I'm just as productive a developer without whatever platonic ideal of a keyboard Apple could put on the thing.
I think a lot of people vastly overestimate the number of Apple customers who have an opinion about this, because it's relatively easy to see complaints on HN, blogs or tech journalism.