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Comment by lancewiggs | Hacker News Reader

They fixed the keyboard, increased the max memory to 32GB and stuck to their guns on the touch bar - and that all seems reasonable to me. (I’m far more annoyed by Microsoft removing ESC as the dbox cancel key for errors in Excel than the disappearance of the ESC key)

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Remapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.

It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. It's much better to remap Caps Lock to Control (by the way, how do you press Control A and Control E and Control L and Control R hundreds of times a day in bash? By reaching to the far away corner located Control? That's absolute madness).

Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now. If you remap your keyboard like that, bash and the Emacs shortcuts enabled throughout macOS will suddenly make A LOT of sense. After a few days it will seem be impossible to work in any other keyboard, which is further proof that the remapping is essential for working efficiently in a Unix environment.

I would personally remap the far away control key to act like an Escape key instead.

Sure, if you're a vi user, the caps lock as ESC will seem rational at first, but outside of vi, all other Unix tools work with control key combinations.

Map it to both. Single tap is escape, hold is ctrl.

https://github.com/jasonrudolph/keyboard

It works super well. I can hit key combos that would normally be tricky super easily.

Now if only I could find a way to standardize my hotkeys across sublime, chrome, vim, terminal and tmux. I’ve gotten close but not where I want to. (As an aside, does anyone know how to make ctrl+w delete the word left to the cursor in chrome and put it in the buffer like in the terminal (and also do the same for subl)?)

> Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now

Couterpoint: when I was working at Lucent around 1999, they gave me a Sun workstation with a keyboard that had Esc instead of Caps Lock. There were others that had a Control key there, though.

Edit: I'm searching online and can't find a Sun keyboard with that layout. Now I'm wondering if I misremembered...

That's interesting. All the Sun keyboards that I have seen have the control key in the place of the caps lock key. I do know that some had the Esc key closer to the home row (back-tick position, I believe).

This is exactly what I've done. CapsLock -> Ctrl, Ctrl -> ESC.

It actually improves the ergonomics of bringing up the Force Quit dialog (my primary use of the ESC key, since I'm not a vi user).

I do this even though I don't currently have a TouchBar model.

> It makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key.

1. Having never used caps lock in years, I think any remap is an improvement.

2. I'm guessing you don't use Vim ;) For me, esc is one of my most frequently used keys.

> Having never used caps lock in years

THAT KEY HAS A LOT TO ANSWER FOR

And to be fair to Apple, they make this remapping super-easy to do. No hacks, weirdness or third party tools are required.

Only if you want to remap to Esc. My preference is to set it as Delete. That I can not do w/o 3rd party apps.

I don’t have a touch bar but I do this too. I have it mapped to escape when pressed on its own and Ctrl when pressed with another key and that works great.

This is really interesting. Did you have to do anything special to make it work in OSX?

Yeah, install Karabiner Elements. It's a handy tool that will let you do a lot of keyboard customization.

Me too. I really hope this catches on.

> increased the max memory to 32GB

For the 15" model only, which costs £2,709 ($3,580)

They didn't really fix it though, did they?

This [0] from this morning was interesting. Apparently AppleInsider has been monitoring a number of Genius Bar and authorized service centers for warranty repairs of 2014 thru 2017 laptops. It seems 2016 MBPs had the most keyboard issues, and the 2017 version brought the claims back down to (and below) 2014/15 levels.

So, it might be reasonable to say they fixed it last year, in terms of prevalence of issues, although absurd cost to repair issue remains; combined with PR, probably explains this year's mod.

[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/13/the-2018-macbook-...

Anytime there's a new chassis launched you have to expect greater failure rates on the early parts, and the 2016 model was the first one with a new chassis, so I'm not sure the data they have tells the entire story.

It's likely there were manufacturing issues that were still being worked out throughout the 2016 cycle and that there were very minor tweaks made during that year's run to improve reliability. If that were the case, the issues would be weighted toward 2016 models manufactured early in the year, and we'd only be able to know if we compared return data to build date.

In my personal experience with a 2016 MBP, one of the issues with the keyboard was that when the system was under load for a significant amount of time, the resulting increase in temperature around the left side of the keyboard would cause keys to stick. The keys would unstick after temps decreased. This was an issue discussed by several people in forums. A manufacturing change to something like the application of thermal paste on the CPU/GPU might change that, without any change to the keyboard design itself.

I’d be interested to see a breakdown of reasons the keyboards failed for each model year.

And what percentage of the pre butterfly design were because of sand/dust etc. then contrast that to the butterfly design percentage. They could have merely improved reliability in another way(s) with the butterfly design.

That would certainly be interesting -- from your other comments comments in this discussion it seemed like you already knew the answer! Guess I assumed too much.

That's literally the point of the article - the design was changed in a significant way to incorporate a fix to reduce dust, which is spelled out in the patent.

I fail to see how what they did is change “in a significant way”. It seems more of a bandaid to me. It almost signals an unwillingness to fundamentally change the keyboard design for the better

Well one person's band-aid is another's significant fix, and only the data will tell.

EDIT: Below is wrong, but keeping it for posterity:

Note that the desktop Magic Keyboards that employ the butterfly mechanism do not seem to have the same key sticking issues as those on MacBooks, so it's likely they felt the fundamental design of the mechanism was fine but that it did need an additional silicone barrier for the lower-travel MacBook variant.

The Magic Keyboards still use scissor switches.

Haha I love being wrong. Thanks for the heads up bangonkeyboard, you live up to your username.

That’s the question raised here: Apple has said that they’ve made the keyboard “quieter”. The jury’s out on whether that was codewords for fixing the issue.

I don’t dispute that. My point is they half-assed the fix

How do you know that? Have you had one of the new keyboards fail on you already?

The escape key never disappeared.

It’s just a soft key rather than a physical one. I use it hundreds of times a day with vim and have never had problems.

You use vim all day and you don't re-map escape? Really?

I don’t remap escape either. I remap caps lock to control and that’s about it. In my opinion most of those screaming loudest about the soft escape key haven’t really used it for more than a minute. It’s not as big of a deal as it’s beubg made out to be.

To me using a remapped escape takes more cognitive energy than using the soft escape.

control-[ ain't so bad

Or C-c with some minor extra config to make it behave identically.

Are you talking about the touchbar esc? Serious question, how the fuck do you use it without tactile feedback?

My approach was to remap caps lock to escape as a press and ctrl as a hold, and then disable the touchbar as much as possible (whoever put unmute and siri next to each other should be taken out and shot btw, that caused me so much annoyance)

The article mentions:

> After all, Apple told The Verge that “this new third-generation keyboard wasn’t designed to solve those [dust] issues.”

The patent contradicts that.

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