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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

But not on purpose. In this case, after a sustained engineering effort, Apple finally and reluctantly concluded that they could not build this particular product up to their standard, so they decided to just not build it at all, instead.

We should applaud that. That's how things should work.

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>But not on purpose.

You could argue that after three models with butterfly keyboards, it's pretty purposeful. It's not like no one pointed it out to them.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. You could excuse the first model using the butterfly keyboard as them not knowing the issues, but multiple revisions have been released since and the keyboard was untouched. That can't not be deliberate.

I mean, they clearly did try to fix it, as evidenced by the membrane they added to the newest revision. The fact that this didn’t actually resolve the issue is unrelated.

Ugh they should really get rid of that keyboard

This is ignoring the fact that very few people have issues with these keyboards overall.

How many people are very few people?

There's 35,000 signatures on a petition to recall the keyboards. There's two class-action lawsuits. There's how many different online writings about the issue?

You can get signatures and file suits for almost anything, that's pretty meaningless. If it wasn't an insignificant percentage, they would've done something about it.

So your basis for the "very few people" is Apple's inaction?

They're really the only entity who knows how widespread this is, and is financially incentivized to address it. Additionally, my employer has probably 30,000 of these keyboards in service and it's not a significant issue.

They're also financially incentivised to downplay the issue considering the class-action lawsuits alleging that they were selling defective keyboards.

I don't think Apple is too concerned about class action lawsuits over keyboards... They'll settle and pay a little cash, another entirely insignificant number.

I had a 2016 MacBook Pro which absolutely had a lot of issues with the butterfly keyboard. It was clearly a bad product. But they definitely fixed the issues with the 2018 one.

There definitely isn't the same level of complains on the internet about it.

There are less complaints about 2018 model. They didn't really fix it.

If my (non-Apple) laptop is anything to go by, the keyboards with that crappy low-rise design have average life expectancy of one year. The 2018 modification will not get clogged with dust until the end of 2019, at which point people will be complaining about it too.

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