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Comment by kenneth | Hacker News Reader

Once I got used to the new keyboards, I actually far prefer them. Ditto with the TouchBar. Yeah, I'm a heretic I suppose.

Keyboard: pleasant clicky-ness and little movement required. Thin AF.

TouchBar: customized with BetterTouchTools to be a hybrid of my most often-used shortcuts (expand menu, alfred, fantastical, window management, and 1password on the left, notification center and lock screen on the right) and music controls with gestures in the middle: shows current track, can change volume, switch tracks, play/pause, mute, or tap into a submenu to pull up most frequent playlists and add current songs to my library. Way better than using the function keys of old.

Oh and the escape key… long remapped to caps lock. If I really need caps lock, fn + caps lock key toggles it.

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The problem that most people have is not with how it feels, it's how unreliable it is with buttons failing or missing keystrokes. Sometimes only caused by a spec of dust.

Getting used to the feeling of the flatter keyboard isn't really an issue for most people.

Exactly

It’s a piece of shit, and even after a replacement it’s broken within weeks.

I'm just contemplating my second return...

No, most people have no issues. There is not a 51% failure rate. Being in a group does not a majority make.

I was referring to the subset of people who have a problem though, not the total number of customers who bought one.

According to Twitter Poll by 50 different Web SaaS companies, All of them had MacBook Pro Keyboard failure in their team and have been working around them.

If you are telling me even a 5% keyboard failure rate within the first 2 year of purchase is an acceptable number that we can simply stop further discussion and say we agree to disagree.

Even a 10% failure rate would be catastrophic and much worse than previous keyboards.

I haven’t had a failure yet and I hate HATE the butterfly switches. I thought the old scissor switches were subpar and prefer a mechanical keyboard, though, so obviously thin and non-tactile are akin to profanity in my world...

How is "little movement required" a good thing though? Having a healthy amount of key travel makes typing a lot more comfortable. I'm not impressed by thinness either. Laptops are thin enough to be functional. When Apple says "our new keyboard design is 40% thinner" it's a non sequitur. The question should be whether it's better, not whether it's thinner. That should attract ridicule like if an energy drink advertised: "Our formula is now 11% more dense!" Like, I'm sure their flavor scientists are aware of the density but that's a random and bizarre data point to be bragging about publicly.

I think it's impossible to make an objective judgement about whether more key travel is better or worse. Personally I got used to the new keyboard in a couple of hours, and never thought key travel again. I do like the "clickiness" of the keys, but I don't really care how far I have to press it.

I would say the toucbar is a completely useless liability, and the poor durability of the keyboard is an issue, but if they were able to produce a butterfly keyboard which worked reliably and had a physical escape key it would be more than fine for me.

Yeah after a year getting used to it I thought the same. Then I went back and used my old Macbook Air while it was getting repaired (for keyboard issues, of course). After using the old MBA keyboard for more than 30 seconds I changed my mind pretty quickly.

> Oh and the escape key… long remapped to caps lock. If I really need caps lock, fn + caps lock key toggles it.

I've remapped escape to caps lock too, but how do you get fn + caps lock to toggle caps lock?

I'm pretty sure you can do it with karabiner, this page has an example with mapping shift+capslock to capslock:

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/

I've tried BTT, but the biggest issue is you're trading touch typing for contextual hunt and peck, even worse if you're opening one of those submenus. You can fit 100x the shortcuts in the same real estate with f1~12 + modifier keys, and you don't have to look down from the screen.

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