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Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

I think I might just be done with Apple. That culture of saying nothing and the surprising customers with things is like betting in Vegas. And unfortunately for Apple, the house always wins. They can repair the damage of the Mac Pro debacle with a new Mac Pro, but they haven't owned the train wreck of a keyboard on the Macbook Pro. Sure, they might be ready to hit it big on a double down on black, but in the meantime, my Lenovo keyboard is a delight.

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What about the trackpad though?

I just can't get over how inferior everyone else's trackpads are.

Apple's trackpads are still in a class above the rest, but trackpads from other manufacturers have seen great improvements over the last 2–3 years.

The choice between Thinkpads and Macbooks is one between best-in-class keyboard with a passable trackpad and passable keyboard with a best-in-class trackpad. To me, that's a tossup.

If I had a Thinkpad I wouldn't care about the trackpad. The biggest annoyance of my 2015 Macbook pro is the lack of trackpoint.

Having recently gotten my first Thinkpad since IBM stopped making them, I was very disappointed that the trackpoint is nowhere near as good as I remember them being. Don't know if it me or the laptops that have changed though

The MacBook Pro trackpad is a disaster - the palm rejection simply doesn't work. Baffling, since palm rejection works fine on the iPad.

> That culture of saying nothing and the surprising customers with things is like betting in Vegas.

Note that Apple quite publicly said that they had issues with the "trashcan" Mac Pro design and that it would take them a couple of years to resolve them.

That's fair. But, they also haven't said anything publicly about the keyboard being shit, despite two attempts now to make it not (with middling results). All this means is that the Mac Pro was a complete failure, while the MBP keyboard is only a train wreck with no casualties. And don't even get me started on the touchbar, which you may have noticed, no one has bothered to copy yet :)

They've said that it's had issues, but you're right: they haven't said that they're going to replace it anytime soon (though rumors point towards this). Also, note that the Touch Bar is quite difficult to copy, even if companies wanted to.

Five years ago Lenovo did a ThinkPad with a similar touchscreen replacement for the Fn key row. It was not well received.

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/thinkpad-x1-carbon-2014-s...

They've effectively made public statements that they feel the keyboard is not shit. They also put their money where their mouth was and created a 4 year replacement program for all butterfly keyboard issues.

Its a really notorious and popularized issue, but Apple has been repairing keyboard issues on these for four years - and even though they improved the design incrementally, they haven't made any significant changes generation-to-generation. Nor have taken such obvious steps as making the keyboard replaceable independent of the top cover - with all the attached hardware and batteries - to make repairs easier and more economical.

Since its hard to imagine Apple blissfully taking a financial hit on the keyboard repairs for four years, you have to imagine there are a combination of other factors at play:

- Some early generations had issues, either due to a manufacturing defect, and Apple thought they could do some combination of replacing keyboards as issues surfaced rather than do a recall, change manufacturing to make the keyboard more robust, and improve the design with new generations. Note that the MacBook Pro with the 2nd generation butterfly keyboard was released over a year after the MacBook Retina. So Apple already should have had substantial repair data on the keyboard at that point. - Apple's numbers on issues are lower because people are living with the issue rather than getting it repaired. I believe Apple has gotten this feedback, which is why they have started to roll out on-site repairs to Apple stores to speed up the process - People who are living with the issue or had the issue are more vocal than people who had issues with previous generations of keyboards - an echo chamber effect - People without issues are also talking about the keyboard negatively - People are contributing to the negativity about the keyboard for other reasons independent of reliability - for instance, a lot of people dislike the low-travel of the keys.

Yeah, they said that in 2017 -- four years after it was introduced in 2013 and left to languish.

And even then, you had to cross your fingers and hope that what they came up with would be good for you. (And based on the pricing of the new Mac Pro compared to the old ones, there's probably a lot of people for whom it won't be a good replacement.)

> Yeah, they said that in 2017 -- four years after it was introduced in 2013 and left to languish.

To add insult to injury, what I dislike about Apple is not reducing prices while component prices have fallen and it’s (generally) cheaper to make devices after volume sales. I’ve said this before, that Apple should be deeply ashamed on its pricing of old and outdated hardware.

Thing is with the keyboard, they've had several opportunities to fix it but it would be very expensive to do so, would require the machine being almost entirely re-engineered because the design hinges so much on that specific keyboard clearance.

It's clear now that they're unwilling redesign their machine ahead of schedule and are happy to ship a below standard and still very expensive device for the 3-4 years spec'd out for this design rather than swallow the cost a redesign would take.

They know Mac users will live with it, what choice do they have?

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