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Comment by aunty_helen | Hacker News Reader

I've just had the keyboard recall done on my 2017 mbp after the J key started failing/duplicating when being pressed.

The whole process, although annoying, was painless. The tech gave me the option of them trying to fix it by blowing dust out or just replacing the entire keyboard. I elected for the later given that it's a design fault. The repair took 1 1/2 days which I had done when I was out of town.

Since they glue everything together, getting a new J key also meant a new keyboard, touch bar, finger print reader, speakers, battery and touch pad. Which if there was no recall I can imagine would be a costly exercise. Hopefully after the recent recalls Apple engineers will be looking at making easier to service components.

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>Since they glue everything together, getting a new J key also meant a new keyboard, touch bar, finger print reader, speakers, battery and touch pad. Which if there was no recall I can imagine would be a costly exercise.

I think this most illustrates not so much that components should be easier to service in and of themselves but rather that it should be Apple's problem universally, not just for a recall. On a product at this level standard legally required warranty should be more like 4-5 years. Apple (or anyone else) can themselves make the economic call on whether costlier repairs are offset by increased revenue due to feature advantages or other QA boosts, but they shouldn't be able to externalize the cost onto their customers and reap any rewards beyond egregious circumstances. The sticker price should include a reasonable expectation of fitness for purpose over a lifespan in line with the price at no extra cost.

It's still a ton of labor to take the whole thing apart, but the new MacBook Air changed to using removable adhesive tabs. I suspect this is why.

2018 MacBook Air Teardown Confirms Improving Repairability With Adhesive Pull-Tabs Under Battery and Speakers

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/08/2018-macbook-air-ifixit...

Amusingly, the 13" MacBook Pro non-touchbar where they have defective SSDs are the only ones that have removable SSDs. The touchbar versions are soldered. I wonder if that's a happy coincidence that they're repairable, or if the reason for these defects is that Apple's engineers screwed up the socket since they have basically no experience with those across the rest of the product line anymore.

Mmm... I wonder if they improved repairability because they expect things to keep breaking...

There's no need to expect that - things keep breaking when they are used. Repairability is becoming a topic, though spreading quite slow, but eventually it will reach the higher ups, and we'll finally get our oldschool thinkpads back. (Hope is a strong emotion.)

I don't understand why there was no standardization effort equivalent to ATX for the classic IBM ThinkPad-era designs.

A standardized form-factor allows easy replacement of motherboard, CPUs, screens, keyboards. Desktop PCs still use ATX cases, ATX power supplies, ATX motherboards.

Desktop PCs can be upgraded while keeping the monitor, keyboard and mouse: the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade can consists of a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU.

There's little reason laptops couldn't have went down the standardization path in the late 1990s. The chassis of a 1998 IBM ThinkPad should be able to components from 2019 without much effort. Just like an ATX desktop case.

My MacBook Air's keyboard never broke (I've had 2, kept them for 2-3 years each.

2-3 years is a ridiculously short lifespan for a laptop. If one of my laptops failed that quickly I would demand the manufacturer provide me with a replacement under Australian Consumer Law. I've used 8-10 year old ThinkPads that worked fine (battery life was the only issue, but a new battery is not that expensive -- since you can replace those on older ThinkPads).

> I would demand the manufacturer provide me with a replacement under Australian Consumer Law.

Funny you mention that - my MacBook Pro was repeatedly serviced during my 3 year AppleCare period, and I noticed that instead of my warranty status showing AppleCare on the statements, after the first couple of services that status had changed to "Australian Consumer Law Requirement".

They still didn't provide me with a replacement machine though - they just keep replacing the SATA flex cable every few months. I'm switching to a ThinkPad now.

Still happily using my 2011 Air. The battery was very easy to replace (5 minutes). The only thing that’s failed is the charging cable frayed and I got a replacement DC side cable with MagSafe connector for like $9 on Amazon.

The only thing holding it back is I could not for the life of me get Boot Camp working with Win10 — UEFI nonsense.

The new Air is finally actually tempting me to upgrade. Before that there was nothing I thought was worth considering.

FYI Micro Center has a $200 discount on some new Airs right now if you have one in your area.

> 2-3 years each

That's not a very long time. Business laptops' extended warranty is 5, and to be honest, 5-6 years old laptops - actually, nearly anything since modern sleep and aes-ni - are perfectly enough, so instead of buying new, it really should be possible to fix a hinge, a display, a keyboard once in a while, instead of needing to buy a new machine.

Does anyone know if the new 2018 MBPs are having keyboard failures, or did their "quieter keys" update fix the issues? It's very hard to find information on whether people have experienced problems since this summer - which might be a good thing! But anything definitive?

My 2018 MBP is having keyboard issues for sure. Some keys, mostly those in the top row of letters, are sometimes not entered or are entered twice.

I too have looked around online for reports of 2018 MBP owners seeing this same thing, but haven't found a lot.

(Also, my WiFi reception seems noticeably worse than my late 2016 MBP, but I'm not sure if that's hardware or some misconfiguration I haven't found.)

EDIT: Your username... Are you from Bloomington or is that a coincidence? :)

They do have hardware failures. I bought a new 13" and started having issues about 2 months in with repeating and dropped keys. Apple store did a straight exchange given how new it was, thankfully.

It's tough to get good data from anecdotes.

Anecdotally, my first-gen butterfly MB keyboard has been flawless, while I've had half the function keys fail on my fancy mechanical keyboard. (Though they failed due to a issue with the underlying mylar strip, and Kinesis was happy to sell me an out-of-warranty replacement part.)

Yes, the 2018 MBPs with "fixed" keyboards still fail. Slightly less than pre-"fix", but still exponentially more than pre-2016 MBPs. If you get one, you really want to have an external keyboard around because it will fail at the worst possible moment.

I bought the 2018 mbp on day 1, so far zero issues with the keyboard.

Not definitive by any means but its all I can offer up to go on. YMMV but thats true of all hardware.

Same. I have had a 2017 MBP for awhile, and have had zero issues with the keyboard. I assume it will fail at some point, but otherwise I like the keyboard.

No they won't. Apple made specific choices NOT to do what the whole industry had already been doing: making repairable systems.

The whole industry has been moving towards smaller, lighter, machines for a while. You don't get smaller and lighter without sacrificing repairability. Screws add weight and size, whereas glue is just as good at holding components in place and adds no extra thickness.

I'm sure there is an inflection point in terms of thickness where you have to switch from screws to glue. And I'm sure there are some laptops that straddle that line and are quite repairable. But it's not correct to say that Apple moving counter to the rest of the industry with respect to repairability.

More consumers have decided to value light and thin over repairable and upgradable.

Logistics at Apple scale is underappreciated too.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's almost cheaper to stock/ship whole motherboard units than individual parts. And much easier to guarantee a tighter repair SLA.

Inventory tracking, storing, shipping, and training don't come free.

Especially if, as Apple, they can likely financially push back on their suppliers for some flaws.

Both Dell XPS 13 (and 15) and Lenovo X1 Carbon are super repairable with screwed in batteries, standard SSDs and easy to remove and cheap to replace keyboards and touchpads.

You are really wrong to assume that thin and light can not be repairable. It's what Apple wants you to believe, but this is just not true.

But I think it's fair to say that Apple is the first one to sell mainstream high volume machines like that and use their reputation to make it standard making it both much easier for others to follow without backlash or even forced to follow in search for ever slimmer device.

Would probably take a week or two here and necessitate shipping to another country...

Half-way through your comment, I though you were going to say it was actually a positive thing that Apple keyboards aren't good enough to type on them...

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