The MacBook keyboard fiasco is surely worse than Apple thinks

I absolutely love developing on my Macbook, but I will not upgrade from my 2015 MBP until they get their head out of their ass.

The 2015 design literally needs no improvement. It's weight is fine, its thickness is fantastic (still allows for fullsize ports), it has a MagSafe, and a great keyboard. I think the only thing I could possibly look for improvement on is a slight shrinking of the bezel. A 15" is just a tad too big to work comfortably on an airplane.

I had a new MBP for my job and could not stand the thing. It was a terrible experience. I ended up having to get an external keyboard because my finger joints were hurting from typing on the keys, the touchbar was utterly useless, the touchpad was too large for it's own good (and constantly failed to do palm rejection) and the lack of Magsafe was terribly inconvenient.

At first I said the keyboard issues were what kept me hanging on to my mid-2012 MBP. Hey, I'm still otherwise buying Apple stuff, though, right? And supporting devs who make macOS software, too, huh?

But here's the thing: that seven year old laptop is getting long in the tooth, and in the increasingly likely scenario where it dies tomorrow, I look at my Linux options. At first there was a solid chance of keeping me on an Apple laptop, even if I'm just holding on to the one I've got. Now? Umm, best ship something that the has a better track record fast, because that cooling fan on the '12 is getting more noisy by the day.

EDIT: you know, it just occurred to me how my wife and I got started on buying Apple kit. Somewhere around 2002-2003, I got tired of dicking with the music players of the era. Worked at Microsoft at the time, and bought into the "Plays for Sure" fiasco, with predictable results (it didn't "play for sure" even back then). Alright, g-ddamnit, get in the car, we're buying iPods. Long story, short, I was so impressed it began our downhill slide into Apple Fanboi-ism.

Now I wonder what will happen if I replace my personal daily driver MBP with a Linux box? 'cuz I'm not doing iOS dev right now and don't have to have a MBP. Just one little change because of dissatisfaction with status quo, and it might go either way.

This issue is currently keeping me from buying a Macbook Pro right now.

I'll take a slightly thicker laptop with a working keyboard. I don't mind them making it slim, but a keyboard has to work. Not taking the risk, especially given how expensive it is to repair macs.

> So here’s some anecdata for Apple. I sampled the people at Basecamp. Out of the 42 people using MacBooks at the company, a staggering 26% are dealing with keyboard issues right now!

Apple employs quite a few more than 42 people using these keyboards... how are its own employees not going berserk?

    Is Apple going to accept that they’re currently 
    alienating and undermining decades of goodwill 
    by shipping broken computers in mass quantities?

I imagine the majority of people who work for Apple understand that. That doesn't necessarily mean the company will respond appropriately. That conflict is what happens when employees lack faith that doing the right thing (for the long-term health of the company) will benefit their own careers. I think that's what is happening at Apple. Individual employees know better, but the company makes a lot of bad decisions, even so.

One of the disadvantages of corporate ordering I think is that you're much more likely to get a bunch of machines from the same production run. If something is wrong with that batch you'll see an inordinately high number of failures, or you might luck out and get a good batch and see no problems at all.

One at a time, you could end up with one machine with each of the failure modes for that manufacturer, or none at all. But with a batch you could get the same problem over and over.

Long ago we ordered 10 ThinkPads for a project. Two summers later a hard drive failed. Then another. And another. By end of summer, about 7 people had needed to rebuild their machines for the exact same reason: bad hard drives. On the plus side, we were exceptionally good at rebuilding by the 4th one. So when mine was #6 I hardly flinched. But I still lost a day (encrypted drives make everything take a lot longer).

There have been a ton of bananas sales on MBPs and MBAs with the new keyboard, but I never even entertained the fantasy of buying one because this keyboard is completely unusable. Everything else is tolerable: bendgate, magsafe, no usb-a, giganto trackpad, half battery life. But I just really, really need a quality keyboard. I need it to work (incredible that I need to say this), and I need it to not destroy my fingers, hands, and wrists.

Frankly, buy a Razer (Blade or Stealth, either one). They're the new top of the line IMO, and have been for years.

I won't purchase another MacBook, that much is certain. Unless they go back and make something good, of course.

I've been developing on a RBS (Razer Blade Stealth) 2019 since the beginning of the year, absolutely love it - felt like the instant upgrade from my late-2013 MBP I was craving, even trackpad and keyboard are improvements imo

will write up on my blog properly after 6 - 12 months daily use

I certainly do not love the keyboard (or touch bar), but I get by with it just fine and don't see it as a deal breaker. We have not had any keyboard-related breakage on our 2016, 2017, or 2018 MBPs, and I haven't encountered anyone in my personal orbit that has had major issues with these machines.

This is not to dismiss any of the breakage that is happening, but to say that it is still possible to have an enjoyable development experience on this machine.

That said, I would love to see the real data about quality and customer satisfaction with this design. And given the changes in repairability, it would be important to understand how maintenance and repair cost to the consumer has changed. I suspect that this data could be used to lobby changes in Apple's warranty practices (both for keyboards and broader issues).

Every time I'm on a conference call and someone has one of the new macbooks, we tease them about typing angry. They are so goddamned loud.

I had my 2015 repaired recently for $400 because I'm waiting for the 2019 macbook and hoping they've gone with a different keyboard design.

The real cost to Apple is long-term/permanent loss of customers, and not just MacBook customers. I've never been an Apple zealot. For a while, they simply offered the most functional products. You paid through the nose, but the products worked well out of the box, were sturdy, and offered innovative solutions.

Over time, I amassed a full collection of Apple products: iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Apple TV. They worked together seamlessly, and in their first iterations, offered something that had little if any competition.

For the MacBook, which has always been computationally weak for the price, the big win for me was the hardware. OSX/MacOS are nice and all, but I've always been a browser-and-terminal developer, so having Unix under the covers is a minor perk; I can just SSH into a Linux machine to do any serious work. What I wanted from the laptop was a good user interface. The MacBook was sturdy, elegant, fairly light, had a great touchpad, great battery life, great display, and while I was never a big fan of the keyboard, it was perfectly fine in earlier models.

The new MacBook keyboard is completely defective. Brand new, it has a poor feel to it, keys stick, the TouchBar is unwanted and buggy. I've worked with at least a dozen of the new models, and they're all like that. I had one completely replaced by Apple, and it died within days.

The problem for Apple is that now I've bought a ThinkPad. I needed a reliable machine, Apple didn't offer one, so I researched and bought something else. Now, after blindly wandering the Apple forest for a decade, I've realized that the rest of the world has not only caught up, but surpassed Apple, across the board.

I'm not going back. I'm probably never going back. Now I have a Google Pixel phone, which is way better than the iPhone. I'll likely get a ChomeOS-based tablet when my iPad finally dies.

Without the MacBook to tie everything together, and with the realization that for years I've been paying twice as much for hardware as I should, and that the competition has more than caught up to Apple's early innovations, they've lost a customer across the board.

I'm not skipping just this bad batch of MacBooks, I'm ditching Apple entirely. And I'm not the only one.

I recently gave up on a slim keyboard MBP and now use a Linux desktop and a mechanical keyboard. The desktop is almost as good and the keyboard experience much better.

>Is Apple going to accept that they’re currently alienating and undermining decades of goodwill by shipping broken computers in mass quantities?

Most people will keep buying Apple computers because they've accepted the Apple "lifestyle" (ecosystem) and think Windows or Linux are gross. Having a poor product doesn't hurt your sales if your buyers perceive the other options are worse.

I am typing this from a Mid-2012 Macbook Air. I have a Macbook Pro 2017 right next to me that I detest using. I'd love to rage-smash the keyboard, but my employer would probably bill me for it.

I have a 2012 MBP. In my particular situation I no longer see the need for a laptop. I'm now thinking I'd be better served by an iMac + iPad. The iMac I've used at work is just awesome.

mid-2015 MacBook keyboards were the best. Just bought another refurbished 2015 pro simply because of the keyboard.

Don't think I'll ever use the new keyboards. Terrible to type on.

The USB-C issue alone is resulting in me returning a recently purchased $2K DongleBook Pro for an earlier version without all of the issues.

I have both types of keyboards (pre-2016) and the 2016 Touch Bar 15" MacBook.

In my experience there are about three failure modes, some of which you can fix by yourself. However, since the keyboard replacement program started I just stopped trying to fix them myself and instead brought them in, because they give you a free new battery too.

1) The key gets physically stuck up and won't press down. You can fix this sometimes by just smushing down the key and crunching whatever crumb was in there down.

2) The key doesn't respond or needs to be pressed hard to respond. This one is hard to fix, but what I tend to try is to get some 70% isopropyl alcohol and a q-tip. Remove the keycap, and dab repeatedly hard and fast with an alcohol soaked q-tip on the round button dot thing. The idea is to get the alcohol in under the dome, and have it dissolve/pump out whatever was stuck in there. A few q-tips worth of alcohol shouldn't reach the logic board, but don't pour alcohol on there directly. When in doubt blow on it, let it dry out, and try again.

3) The key repeats. This one in my experience is easily fixable with the above alcohol and q-tips method.

I've used these methods on a 2016 13" touch bar (problem 2) and a 2016 15" touch bar (problem 3; put in little effort and gave up and elected to get a free new battery). Both were purchased used for cheap, and the 15" touch bar had previous coffee in the keyboard, as I later found out (a little.), and it surprisingly worked fine for about a year until it became unhappy. I've also had a 12 inch MacBook from 2016 that was just fine, even after eating crumby food while using it on vacation.

Based on these experiences, I don't think the new keyboard design rolled out in 2018 with the silicone membrane solves anything but 1), the least frustrating of the three.

I haven't had a dead keyboard to destructively tear down yet, but from observation it appears that the keyboard is made as a plastic sheet with traces on it, and a little metal dome that pops up and down to make or break contact with the traces. Over the domes, there's another cover sheet that's not completely sealed, because it has cut outs for the key hinges and a little weep hole for air to come out when it's pressed. I think the dirt is going in through these. Perhaps if they move to capacitive sensing, or add a little nub under the metal dome and replace the switch layer with the pressure-sensitive sandwich from the older kinds of keyboards, making it so that the part that sucks dirt in doesn't have to make contact but just pressure, this would be resolved better.

The thing is, when typing I really do enjoy the newer type a lot more since the lower key travel requires much less force to actuate than the older ones. The actuation point is also much more precise due to the metal domes vs the rubber ones in the older ones.

"... than Apple says" as thinking and saying is not the same thing.