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Comment by roystonvassey | Hacker News Reader

I am a huge fan of Apple's products and never understood the fuss when the new Pro Keyboard attracted bad press, reading it on my old, robust pre-2015 era Macbook.

Until now. I got the new one at my job three months back. And, here I am, still struggling with and super annoyed with the missed keystrokes (the buttons are so thin/don't press properly), the almost non-existent 'Enter' keys (seriously, who messes with the Enter keys! ), the useless touchbar. I look like a klutz when I have to show code/artefacts to someone because I am always mistyping or closing windows.

Additionally, the touchbar led me to one heart-stopping evening of infinite restarts[1].

I am terribly disappointed that they released such a shoddy product, especially since it's used as a workhorse by thousands of developers world-wide.

1. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8189417

EDIT: Grammar errors

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Same boat.

Against my better judgement, I bought a 2017 MacBook Pro about 6 months ago to make it easier to work with a client.

I sold it this week at a big loss.

Between the terrible keyboard, the useless Touch Bar, and the dongle hell, and general hardware flakiness, this was the worst laptop I've ever owned, Apple or otherwise (and I've owned almost every Apple laptop generation since the PowerBook G3).

Good riddance.

Literally praying that they fix this crap in the next update. My mbp is getting on in years, and if they don't do something I'm going to move to linux for my next machine.

Amen. I'm using a company issued "new" MBP and oh! do I loathe it! Have been repeatedly one click away from buying a Carbon X1 for little more than half what an MBP would cost. Seriously, Apple... don't underestimate the domino effect, my home looks like an Apple Store but once I begin "fiddling around" to make something else work and it eventually does, there's no more incentive to remain inside your Gilded Enclosure

I have a carbon X1 and would have preferred to keep my 2013 macbook air. Then again my X1 is gen 1.

Windows just seems to be garbage with multi-tasking, specifically I miss the gestures.

Maybe this is a market opportunity for somebody to build a laptop with high end components (monitor, keyboard, touchpad) running a super-duper-well-integrated linux.

That sounds very like my Dell XPS 13 (on which, in fairness, I run Windows).

But - I have to say I preferred the hardware on my old Sony Vaio Pro 13. The Dell keyboard is OK but the action isn't great, the battery life isn't great, and I really miss the extra thinness from having a carbon shell instead of aluminium.

The perfect laptop will exist somewhere, eventually...!

I believe you're looking for the XPS13 that comes with Ubuntu.

I've heard that, but I'm skeptical: does Dell maintain the integration, or do they just install Ubuntu on it? If I seem to have a problem with the integration between the installed touchpad, who do I go to? The Ubuntu forums, or Dell support?

They support the integration. Dell support will support it and if something is not working it will be covered by warranty the same way Windows is.

I certainly agree. System76 [1] is probably your best option there. They're attempting to do just that.

1. https://system76.com/laptops

Nice, thanks for the link. That seems really promising! But it sounds like they still need to fix the trackpad (a decently working trackpad has been my main struggle with Linux laptops): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/review-system76s-gal....

Not sure about Linux but the surface book 2 is a really good one.

Maybe a Purism Librem laptop?

Oh yeah, forgot the add-ons. My laptop bag is now like a knapsack - usb converter, hdmi converter and an another for the earphone.

I am in the same boat. Received one at work and can not stand the keyboard. I requested an older model, but they are no longer providing them. It might seem dramatic, but I spend my days typing and I need my keyboard to not get in my way. I have resorted to bringing a USB keyboard into work with me.

I have to know if this story is gaining traction because of the Joe Rogan podcast. Did you see his hour long rant on abandoning Apple because of this yesterday? Or is everyone simultaneously reaching this same conclusion?

He was very much a kool-aid drinker, but also a writer, so the keyboard is apparently a huge deal to him. I've basically never owned an Apple product so I'm just watching this from an outsiders perspective.

People have been complaining about the shallowness and lack of travel of the new keyboard since it came out on the new MacBook, but it's really been an issue once professionals were forced into it on their MacBook Pros.

As far as the fatal design flaw, the earliest occurrence I know of bringing it out into the open is when Casey Johnston wrote about it for The Outline in October of last year: https://theoutline.com/post/2402/the-new-macbook-keyboard-is...

Edit to add: Casey championing this issue is mentioned in the originally linked article.

So this has been going on for some time, I see. It just seemed like a coincidence that he was railing on it for an hour and then I see this today. His shows get like 5 million views, so it seems probable he could steer a conversation.

Do you know which episode this was?

He mentioned it early on in the most recent one with Duncan Trussell #1137

Yeah, it's like the intro to their conversation https://youtu.be/SIwSXODoJuU

I’ve seen new MBP users bring usb keyboards to meetings.

The year of the Linux laptop may soon be upon us. ;-)

Yeah, I switched and am pretty happy.

To be fair, when you're actually in work, do you not find a less cramped keyboard, proper magic mouse (or magic trackpad) and dual monitors make you more productive? I know they do me.

> To be fair, when you're actually in work, do you not find a less cramped keyboard, proper magic mouse (or magic trackpad) and dual monitors make you more productive? I know they do me.

I like Apple's trackpads, but the functions that they enable are merely nice-to-have features. If you spend your day typing, any noticeable drop in keyboard reliability is going to outweigh any other input-device productivity gain. Keyboard reliability is a critical showstopper feature.

Yes. I have all that built into my old MBP, so I put a giant monitor above the laptop screen, and use the laptop keyboard + trackpad.

Same boat here as well. Three of my keys continuously either don't register or register multiple times. Took it in to an Apple store and they fixed one (for a short amount of time) and quoted $800 in repairs (and 5-7 day turnaround) for the other two (to "replace the laptop frame"). Replacing a keyboard (or even just keys) should not be this hard.

Does anyone have any insight into why Apple's QA took a turn for the worse over the past couple years?

Buggy IOS/OS releases and now the hardware issues... I always equated Apple with quality and consistency (along with price), but now I can't really see how the price is justified with the issues they have been having.

They no longer have Steve Jobs Quality Control? He was the type of person to play with something for 5 minutes and say "yeah... no" or to eagerly take something he liked and abuse the hell out of it for 24 hours then come back with a laundry list of improvements.

He was a jerk and he cared deeply about user experience.

In his absence you have what exactly? Tim Cook lacks vision, if you want your mountain moved to Pluto he'll have it there by Tuesday but he'll never stop and ask "why?" Jon Ive ascended from above to bless us with the word "chamfer" while carpenters and machinists world wide rolled their eyes in unison, his focus is purely on aesthetic.

It's more like Steve Jobs was such an uncompromising asshole that he would rather throw a substandard product in the garbage than put out something he considered lesser. He didn't have vision, nothing he "made" was revolutionary at all, and he didn't make anything after the NeXT. Steve Jobs was amazing at two things: getting in on the ground floor (the iphone came out so quickly after the first all touch screen smartphone that no one even remembers the original) and making sure that what they did put out either worked or didn't see the light of day. I remember the early android competitors (notably Motorola's droid) suffering from touchscreens that failed to track accurately (https://www.wired.com/2010/03/touchscreens-smartphones/) compared to the near perfect performance of the iPhone, its the sort of thing that Steve Jobs would have insisted on.

>and making sure that what they did put out either worked or didn't see the light of day

Regardless Job's issues, this was the best and most importand part.

Your toaster should work! If the user has to push the trigger twice (only to have it overcooked) - you should either work on your mistakes and release when you are finished, or throw a it in the garbage.

What was the original?

My memory of the time was seeing a bunch of cool Microsoft Surface demos, thinking "someone is gonna make a killing putting this on a phone", and the iPhone coming out a few months later. I'll go so far as to say that I think it was the first touch screen phone that was actually manufactured and sold.

But I'll be very curious to be proven wrong!

The LG prada phone was 6 months earlier than the iphone demo and was all-touch with a capacitive screen. LG claimed apple ripped off their design, but I think it’s more a case of hardware evolving to the point this became possible and both companies implementing, but LG releasing a less ambitious product sooner.

I see now that we've been talking about "touch screens" in this thread, but I've been thinking of that as meaning the multi-touch screens we're all so familiar with now (and of which the Microsoft Surface was the first demo I saw). It looks like the Prada had a capacitive screen, but not multi-touch. Maybe multi-touch was the thing, which is why the Prada was forgotten? Maybe not, maybe the iPhone just won by marketing and deals with carriers. Beats me.

In any case, I'm quibbling, I didn't know about the Prada before you mentioned it, which makes your point. Thanks for the pointer!

> What was the original?

Here's a wikipedia link for the curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

> He didn't have vision, nothing he "made" was revolutionary at all, and he didn't make anything after the NeXT.

Maybe vision is the wrong word. You're right that he wasn't imagining the future most of the time. What he did have was a degree of objectivity and restraint. He wasn't blinded by the "wow" factor of a new technology and could objectively weight it's merits. Where as most tech companies try to cram the latest and greatest technology into their products to have an impressive bullet list to show around, he held back until he felt the technology was ready.

I had a full touch screen, color, icon grid of 3rd party apps, internet enabled, smart phone in 2001.

Samsung SPH-i300

I had multiple web browsers, email, irc client, telnet and ssh clients, and an open marketplace of thousands of 3rd party apps for every oddball purpose, like I had a resistor color decoder, netmask calculator, etc.

2001.

iphone came out in 2007, and had no 3rd party apps.

I'm with popsiclepete. I had a long string of "smart" devices before the iphone and they were, unilaterally, garbage. Even the ones with great hardware(looking at the treo 600 series here especially) had awful software and bad battery life.

I bought the very first color palm pilot and was first-in a lot of tech. All this stuff was really, really clunky to use and just generally bad. I couldn't hand it to someone else and expect them to figure out how to use it without being shown.

Also, styluses were terrible except for corner-case inputs. The fact that there's essentially only one mainstream brand making a main-line phone with them goes to show this was true.

I agree it was a flub the iphone didn't launch with apps, but i honestly think people needed a year to get used to the interface concept and a lot of complete garbage would have come out of people trying to get first mover on the market(and it DID, even a year later, absolute shovelware)

People really shouldn't be romanticizing pocketpc, or even palmOS. The first truly good mobile OS palm put out was WebOS, and it took microsoft until windows mobile 7... both after the iphone.

I also was a "power user" with some Nokia/Symbian bullshit that had "thousands of apps" and it was absolute garbage compared to my first iPhone. For a normal person.

Let's stop romanticizing the cell phone market pre-Apple/Android - there's a reason the rest of them folded and effectively died or went into obscurity within a few years.

You forget to mention that it was utter garbage in comparison.

It was also 6 years old when the iPhone came out. Most 6 year old devices are utter garbage compared to their contemporaries.

Steve Jobs was responsible for the original Macintosh, the device that constantly over-heated and had the same repairability problems then as these Mac Book Pros.

I know Jobs is Silicon Valley Jesus, but he did not walk on water.

I am still confounded how people continue to say that Tim Cook has no vision, as if he's simply some sort of bean counter with green shades who just lucked into become the CEO of one of the world's largest companies.

Tim Cook's vision is much larger than computers if you haven't been paying attention. Look, from what I can observe, ever smaller devices, lifestyle devices, the focus on privacy, their take on the cloud; Apple is looking to position itself to exist intimately in our lives. The only way to get there is to have the same level of trust that you do with family or even a lawyer. \\

And yet Apple is eroding trust by pushing buggy software and poor quality hardware. Maybe his focus is just elsewhere but Apple is who they are today because of an attention to their products that other companies lack.

Maybe he's trying to position Apple as a privacy minded trustworthy company when it comes to your data but he's ignoring or entrusting the crown jewels to someone else while he does it. If people stop buying Apple products because they're unreliable and support sucks then it won't matter.

What's the vision exactly? The focus on privacy? What exactly are they doing about that? Their "take on the cloud" is what? 'Do it badly'?

> Apple is looking to position itself to exist intimately in our lives. The only way to get there is to have the same level of trust that you do with family or even a lawyer.

Bleh. That is just awful marketing speak. Why would anyone trust them to "existing intimately" in 'their life' if they can't even reliably produce reliable computers (regularly)?

My iPhone 5 (ha) is fine, but I'm hanging onto it for as long as I can because I expect to be disappointed by upgrading.

People express that Tim Cook has no vision because he's failed to deliver like Steve Jobs did (in a way they care about).

None of that is new since Jobs died.

What's wrong with chamfer?

Absolutely nothing! I just don't care for Jon Ives, he's pretentious and likes to demonstrate his superiority by using domain specific terms in casual conversation to impress the layman. When the iPhone 4<?> came out Jon Ives would talk about how exquisite the matte chamfered aluminum edges were as if it was an engineering miracle and he single-handedly invented the chamfer mill.

Don't get me wrong, I think his passion is wonderful and I enjoy listening to him talk about physical design in much the same way I enjoyed watching the movie Helvetica. But he's still a pretentious twat and my impression is that he doesn't care about design beyond it superficially meeting his immediate needs. Similar to how an artist might build an installation for an exhibition with no concern for it surviving beyond that, I don't think Jon Ives designs products with longevity in mind.

When Jony Ive became more important than (the now defunct) Steve Jobs, form rose over functionality.

> (the now defunct) Steve Jobs

That's one way to refer to a dead guy.

This is my new favorite euphemism for death. "Deceased" just sounds boring. "Defunct" has a certain weight to it.

How about "obsolete"? "Deprecated"? "No longer supported on this hardware"?

Nah, those all imply that he's still alive but prone to malfunction at any time.

Buffalo Bill's defunct https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47244/buffalo-bill-s

Try having a QA department keep up with bugs when the culture changes to move fast and break things

You can explain Apple’s problems with a much simpler albeit banal reason: its sheer size. It has grown massive.

They took over the old Sun campus in Sunnyvale while the UFO was under construction, and shortly thereafter the word was that those teams would be remaining there long term as the HQ was already overbooked. Apple also bought up a lot of space in San Jose a couple of years ago.

Apple pioneered small and fast teams of veterans. But it doesn’t scale well to this size. It’s a challenge to effectively coordinate hundreds (thousands?) of teams building various integrated hardware, software, and service components.

Nothing screams "Apple" as much as a perfectly designed, elegent beautiful, device (campus) that is underpowered and unsatisfactory on launch day, requiring a bunch of external attachments to make it useful outside of the demo use case.

I used to be an Apple fanboy when they were the only option in town for a usable UNIX laptop. Which, quite honestly, hasn't been the cause for a long time.

I love my Dell XPS Dev. Edition (9350). All stock intel hardware, everything works (except the track-pad touch detection, can be flaky sometimes) and Manjaro Linux absolutely flies on it.

The build quality of the laptop is outstanding. The only thing that I'm not in love with is the webcam placement, but not a deal-breaker.

It cost me $999 2 years ago and feels as snappy as my 2015 top-of-the-line Macbook Pro that I use at work.

I'm not saying it's better than the Apple/OS X combo in every way, but it's a great overall machine and Linux doesn't suck on laptops anymore. There's no need to put up with Apple selling you 2016 hardware at 2018 prices and an OS that isn't that special anymore.

Each one of these concerns is making me clutch to my early Macbook Air. I'm terrified to upgrade. In fact, a colleague recently purchased a Macbook Pro and I steered them clear of the touchbar.

The 11 inches MBA is the best laptop for me. If they just upgrade the processor to the latest gen, and the screen to retina I'd upgrade to that in a heart beat.

I like those too and just bought a second one (2015 model) for the girlfriend. It seems a shame that they stopped making them. I guess maybe it was too much competition for the more expensive, usb2-less Macbook.

Clinging to my 11" MBA (2014) as well. 4-core, perfect size, indestructible. Totally agree that if they would make any modest improvements just to keep it current (proc, mem, wifi, etc.) I would refresh every year or two. I don't want the newer MacBooks with half the processor, no magsafe, and bad keyboard.

2-core, 4-thread

If they updated the screeen on the 11” it would be perfect. The 12” Retina screen is such a huge improvement over the 1366x768 screen

The (later) MacBook Air keyboard has similar problems (to the ones described in the article). My previous MBA had keys that stopped working after a year. And you cannot easily replace the keys without breaking them. :(

In addition to all of these valid complaints, it's also loud!

So true. Earlier in meetings we can go about silently browsing or replying to emails. But now the keyboard is so loud that we have to apologize to the speaker!

Or the alternative, paying attention.

You’re making the bold assumption that there is anything being said that is worth paying attention to.

Then decline the meeting. Unless you're a very junior developer or a brand new employee (and probably don't have the necessary experience or context, respectively, to determine whether or not you need to pay attention) you probably have the right to decline meeting invites.

It's not like anyone might want to take notes or something.

> Earlier in meetings we can go about silently browsing or replying to emails.

The complaint was not about taking notes, it was about being unable to ignore the speaker and reply to emails during a meeting.

If the meeting was worthwhile, we wouldn't feel the need to check emails during said meeting ;)

My point stands, just decline the meeting.

"just decline the meeting"

Not always possible for... political reasons.

It's louder than their past keyboards but it's not loud. Compare it to a mechanical keyboard.

LOL - yes, I suppose it could be louder. But when’s the last time you saw somebody using a mechanical keyboard in a business meeting?

Even at desks in the office, I'm not a fan of people bringing in super clacky mechanical keyboards. I have my mechanical keyboards at home and they are great, but I'm not going to subject my coworkers to that amount of noise. If people want to use a mechanical keyboard at work, they really should do everything they can to silence the clackiness.

There's one self-centered hipster in every office.

Compared to a typewriter, it's even quieter

I have the same issue with missed keystrokes. I estimate at least 5% of what I type has to be fixed.

Apple products are overrated. Their selling point is security and ease of use but we all know you that a computer cannot protect you from breaches. As for ease of use, most devices nowadays are pretty intuitive.

Why would anyone buy a low performance laptop for thousands of dollars, additional dongles and external keyboards when you can get a lightweight MSI laptop that's far superior in every single way for so much less?

*Return key

Earlier this year, I returned my brand new MacBook Pro and asked for my old 2016 MacBook Pro back. I'm a touch typist and I just don't get enough feedback from the new keyboard to be sure I pressed a key. It actually slowed down my typing. And the lack of and ESC and function keys means that I just can't develop on it anymore. I'm still happily using my 2.5 year-old MacBook Pro.

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