MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy | Hacker News Reader

MacBook Pro Keyboard Drives Me Crazy

ryanbigg.com

655 pointsryanbigg575 comments

The worst part is that I can tell this keyboard is actually having a detrimental effect on my typing abilities. Since being on these keyboards for years now, I've noticed that my typing speed has slowed, as I spend a significant amount of cognitive energy preparing to fix mistakes. The faster you type, the more annoying it is to go farther back to fix something. I'm not sure how to quantify the focus it steals from tasks or the anxiety it gives me, but I think they are also real. Not to mention it is infuriating to see some strange spelling error that is completely the keyboard's fault in a message or email you sent, making you look like an idiot.

The thread from @getify ( https://twitter.com/getify/status/1165300052463480832 ) on having to wait 3 days for a repair, even though it is done in-store is truly infuriating. He is absolutely right that it makes no sense to have to leave a computer sitting around doing nothing, and you should just be able to be told to bring it back when your computer would be 24 hours away from being repaired. The computer isn't being shipped anywhere, but Apple must still severely hamper your productivity on a product you spent thousands of dollars on.

Their constant reference to a "small minority of users experiencing this" in light of these huge delays at the store for a super-quick and simple fix has become insulting. I won't register anywhere as someone "experiencing this issue" since I don't have 3 days to not use my computer for a fix that will probably break again in months.

I feel you. A long time ago I had a windows laptop keyboard that was glitching out. After a few weeks, I literally threw it out the window in frustration! I'm more mature now, I think...

Curious if you’ve tested this. I thought the keyboard was slowing down my speed, so I did a lot of wpm testing and was surprised that I was slightly faster. I still feel slower after the tests and have verified it a couple of times. I’m not sure how to account for this phenomenon other than possibly the lower travel feeling like less intense effort.

I did a test recently -- today! -- myself on this, and found that the butterfly keyboard does slow me down a bit compared to my usual rate, which I wouldn't have actually predicted; I'm slightly slower on it in terms of raw keystrokes and also slightly less accurate. But it's not an incredible difference, and there are other keyboards I've used (like the much-hyped Brydge keyboard for the iPad Pro) which had more deleterious effects.

Interesting. I wish there could be a corpus of data on this to help understand what makes the keyboard better for some and worse for others.

I feel that I am more likely to brush a neighboring key and that key is more likely to trigger on the butterfly keyboard of my 2017 work machine than on my 2014 home machine. I end up doing a lot more corrections on the butterfly keyboard.

It seems like the tighter spacing and lower travel result in more unintentional key presses.

Yes, I think the keyboard needs the typist to adapt to it more than is appropriate for a mass market keyboard. I had the 2014 also and had to unlearn how I rested my hands on it and touched it. Not everyone will equally succeed at that, as evidenced by my coworkers who are still hitting the 2017-2019 keys way too hard.

> having to wait 3 days for a repair

He's lucky he has an Apple Store to go to. I had to turn in my 2017 MBP to a "Authorized Service Provider" who in turn had to send it in to Apple. I was without my machine for 10 days (luckily I still had my old, working 2012 MBPr I could just imagine my machine onto and keep working)

> just imagine my machine onto and keep working

I assume you installed an image of your 2017 machine onto the 2012 machine... but the idea of imagining onto a machine is a nice one.

You could just imagine a working keyboard.

Actually we do have an App Store in our city. But it took also 2 weeks to repair it. The staff at Genius Bar said they didn't have enough capacity.

Does Apple not offer a loaner laptop during that period? If not, I'm quite unimpressed. These laptops are expected to be purchased by working professionals... what does Apple imagine is the customer workflow when an issue arises? Pause your work while the laptop is in repair?

They do not. I've heard their recommended advice if this is a problem is to fork out and purchase yet another laptop at your own cost, and return it within the return window.

So any bump on the aluminum that the store clerk doesn't approve of would cost you around $800? (since I assume the only way out would be selling it second-hand with a huge discount)

Buy another one...

> These laptops are expected to be purchased by working professionals

But these are not business type products, macbook pro laptops are luxury consumer goods if anything.

> But these are not business type products, macbook pro laptops are luxury consumer goods if anything.

What are you basing this woefully uninformed statement on? Countless companies issue MBPs to their staff.

> wait 3 days for a repair

My 2015 MBP is affected by the battery recall and they want 2-3 weeks to send it off to a repair centre to have the battery replaced. No chance to have it done in-store owing to safety concerns (which I'm not sure I entirely buy given that it's an overheating issue, but it's hard to tell without the full details). And no budging on the timeframe or possibility of a loaner. One of the more frustrating customer service experiences.

Not that I'd like to be in charge of organising a recall of 500,000 laptops.

> My 2015 MBP is affected by the battery recall and they want 2-3 weeks to send it off

If you really have to understand the pain, the laptops are banned in Indian flights (domestic and international)[1]. Imagine a company issued laptop not being usable at an important customer exhibition and a lag of 2-3 weeks :-(

https://www.livemint.com/technology/tech-news/specific-model...

And only a few years ago, before the thinnness wars, this would have been a complete non-issue: One would just fly without the battery attached, as those were easily removable.

They just said '2-3 weeks' to give themselves some cover at first I think. On the day of its announcement they said 2-3 weeks. When I actually registered to send mine in a week or two later, it said 5 days. And it took maybe 5 days (I wasn't really paying that much attention, I don't use my MBP all that often) from when fedex picked it up to when they dropped it off with the battery replaced. It was actually quite a pleasant experience all things considered. Only gripe I really had about it was that the support person I chatted with when registering my system for the repair requested I use the system to do multiple things (add a separate administrative user for them to use if necessary, log out of iCloud, deactivate system in iTunes, etc). When you tell me not to use a system at all because it is in danger of bursting into flames at any moment, I'm not a big fan of then being told to use it to prep for sending it in...

I contrast this with the experience my dad has while traveling in NYC with his pro laptop in about 2011. The Apple Store needed 3 days to repair, and he was leaving the city before then. They simply recommended a 3rd party repairer who could do it within the day, which is what happened, and consequently giving my dad what he needed, boosting the Apple eco system, and providing better feelings towards Apple.

In the past 5 or so years, however, Apple has consistently been killing their 3rd party repair eco system, as well documented by Louis Rossmann. The idea that they may recommend a 3rd party repair source seems unimaginable, but further, most 3rd party repair basically involves sending the package to Apple repair anyways, as they’re not allowed to make changes on their own for anything but a small subset of issues.

Apple's support website still lists all authorized third party repair outlets, of which there are many in most cities.

I've been recommended them before, it's not unimaginable, and no, they generally don't send it to Apple (source: a good friend who works at London Drugs, which has a fairly good Apple-authorized computer shop inside of its various locations in Canada). If the laptop itself isn't serviceable (e.g. rare things like diagnosed catastrophic mainboard failure) they will just replace it from repair stock if it's under warranty. The top case / keyboard IS serviceable by most third party outlets to my understanding.

Did you see their press release this morning?

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/08/apple-offers-customer...

> New Independent Repair Provider Program Expands Genuine Parts Access to More Repair Businesses

> Cupertino, California — Apple today announced a new repair program, offering customers additional options for the most common out-of-warranty iPhone repairs. Apple will provide more independent repair businesses — large or small — with the same genuine parts, tools, training, repair manuals and diagnostics as its Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs). The program is launching in the US with plans to expand to other countries.

> “To better meet our customers’ needs, we’re making it easier for independent providers across the US to tap into the same resources as our Apple Authorized Service Provider network,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. “When a repair is needed, a customer should have confidence the repair is done right. We believe the safest and most reliable repair is one handled by a trained technician using genuine parts that have been properly engineered and rigorously tested.”

For "most common out-of-warranty iPhone repairs" I'd bet they're talking about batteries and screens. Especially alongside the recent "battery health" change where it only gives stats for Apple's batteries.

> having to wait 3 days for a repair, even though it is done in-store is truly infuriating

Oh - but it gets worse. I had my keyboard replaced a year ago, and it took over a week. In Norway they don't stock US International keyboards, which I can accept, but they can't (or won't, hard to tell) order a replacement unit before taking it into service. So it has to stay with them while they wait a 3-5 days just to get the spare parts. Great!

I was about to walk out of the store when they told me they needed my password to run "keyboard diagnostics" and that they were unsure wether or not KEYS FALLING OFF was covered by warranty.

I worked in computer/ phone repair - given the context keys falling off should definitely be under warranty. However lacking that context (let's assume there aren't widespread keyboard issues for that model) keys falling off could be the result of "rough handling" - we can't tell if a frustrated user was pounding at their keys or not, etc

But yeah given the known widespread keyboard issues for the Macbooks...

"rough handling" hehe. Wouldn't surprise me if Apple went and said this right out: stop typing that hard on our delicate little keys, be gentle, remember when you were holding our iDevice incorrectly? and we told you so.

Don't get me wrong, it would just be Apple throwing excuses here.

In general you never know with people :P. We also bought tablets/phones. Guy came in with his kids, kid tries to sell us a kindle fire that's in great condition that he "found in the woods" - right the woods? Do you mean somebodies backpack?

> I don't have 3 days to not use my computer

You're really that busy? You don't have a PC or a spare old laptop to continue working on?

For everyone that hasn't seen it, reports are they've already decided to change the keyboard on forthcoming models. Discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353148

Edit: added "reports are"

I really wish this was the top comment. I feel like HN is turning a little too much into an echo chamber dunk fest sometimes.

Cut us some slack, we're all spending _all_ our time on shit keyboards.

Speak for yourself..

Speak for yourself. (Typed on an IBM Model-M keyboard)

Not quite on that level (Cherry mx), but I have to concur. If you're not always on the go a proper keyboard is worth the investment.

Especially because working with just a laptop is horrible ergonomically.

Yup, it baffles me how many people who earn their money writing code seem to either be content with crappy laptop keyboards or shy away from investing a few hours’ salary in a decent keyboard that they’ll be using for tens of thousands of hours.

The Cherry G80 with blue switches (I believe) I shortly used at a startup gig last year actually was at Model M level, sans the typing noise/headache. Saying this as someone who actually used Model M keyboards in 1991-3 on PS/2 50 and 80 PCs.

I used an Apple "ergo" keyboard in the early 90s. Had several of them, they all failed with dead keys and unintended multiple keystrokes within six months. The more things change . . .

The Microsoft Ergo Keyboard, the first one released in 1995 or so, was well nigh perfect (well, once you remapped capslock to something useful, which you could do in software, or in hardware with a little gumption and some conductive paint). Probably saved my career. Then the quality of Microsoft keyboards went to hell as they cost-reduced their way to mediocrity. The more things change . . .

I use a Kinesis Gaming Keyboard now, and I think it's one of the best ergo keyboards on the market. It's programmable to a reasonable degree, has decent key feel, and I've been pounding on a couple of them pretty hard since they were released 2+ years ago without experiencing any issues. I think Kinesis has a clue, but that doesn't mean they won't change . . .

The Keyboardio keyboard has an interesting design and great build quality, but I'm too damned old to retrain, and it requires significant effort to reach a decent typing rate. I'm not up to it. I'd be very interested in buying a more traditional split keyboard from the Keyboardio team if they ever decide to build one. There are probably 10 people at my smallish company who would buy them, too. Kaia and Jesse, if you're reading this, take my money :-)

The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard is just not quite there. The build quality is excellent and the team put an incredible amount of work into the thing, but the lack of an ESC key just kills me. "Hacking" keyboard . . . but no escape key. I just don't understand. Yes, you can remap keys, but you're going to lose something important to a shift sequence that your fingers are going to stumble on for weeks. (Yes control-[ is ESC but this is not the 1970s and I'm not typing on an ADM3A terminal any more).

One thing I'd love to see is an ergo keyboard that includes pressure and velocity information along with keystrokes. I'd like a warning from the system that I'm typing too hard, for one thing, and I'm sure the information would be useful for other purposes.

Still using a 2011 ThinkPad precisely because of the keyboard.

Me too. The laptop is an inch thick, and _I love it_.

We need a revival of bauhaus design - no distinction between form and function. If it falls short at its function, it fails as a form, and should not be accepted.

I am using an Apple wireless keyboard (~2014? model, before they changed to thin keys) and I love it. I've used a load of keyboards in my time including some very good mechanical ones, and it's my favourite.

"Shit" is in a lot of ways subjective.

Dunno. The keyboard on my T420 still works 9 years later. None of my desktop keyboards have broken in 5+ years of use, and they were incredibly cheap (10-20€). Keyboards are a solved problem. Apple just keeps inventing new ones.

>I really wish this was the top comment.

It is now at least

Also, just to throw another opinion into this dumpster fire:

I had to get a new laptop, knew I was getting a 2019 MBP, and was terrified the keyboard experience would be horrendous due to the coverage I see on the topic here.

And it isn't at all. It feels different than my 2015 model, but... definitely not worse. I may even be just slightly better because it's noticeably quieter.

Just one perspective, but yeah. The keyboard rage on here should not be taken as anything approaching absolute truth.

I agree, the keyboard is fine, until it stops working properly. Apparently, the problems described in the article are not rare occurrences. That, and also the keys which start to fade out (see some other comments). I have both problems on my 2018 MBP.

I think the keyboard rage comes from the fact that they changed a perfectly fine keyboard with a bogus one, just to have a slightly slimmer laptop (along with many other gimmicks such as the touchbar, or the oversized trackpad).

Indeed. I switched to a 2017 MBP and thought the keyboard was honestly fine, until after a while the keys gradually started chattering and eventually just outright not working.

I don’t think I agree that it’s better than the old keyboard, and it certainly feels a bit icky to type on, but...

There are much worse keyboards.

Quieter? You must have softest typing finger touch imaginable. Every person I see use it is dramatically louder than the old style.

When it works, it’s fine. I’ve had a 2018 MBP for a year and apparently didn’t draw the short stick. The travel distance ceased to be a problem after the first week, and I don’t think about the keyboard day to day.

That said, even in my ideal, happy-path case, there’s one minor flaw I do occasionally run up against, which I rarely see mentioned: the keys are too close together. It’s easier – not greatly so, but perceptibly – to hit adjacent keys. There’s no question in my mind that going back to the old keyboard will be an improvement across the board, even for those who haven’t had any of the marquee issues.

Except not breaking does not a good keyboard make. It still is very bad, no travel, no resistance, feels like a kids' toy. Make something solid and durable for once, apple.

The 2019 model is better than 2018. They fixed several keyboard issues. (duplicate keys, jamming, etc).

2019 model did not fix anything.

I liked my 2019 MBP keyboard too. Until one week I noticed it kept repeating e's and n's. And then I learnt its not fixable unless you are prepared to go without a machine for 3 to 14 days. And then I learnt from Rossman Youtube that your machine might never be the same again after Apple's "genius"'s get their hands on.

Honestly, I thought it was all a fuss about nothing. But it isn't. BTW my machine is 6 months old. It started malfunctioning 2 months ago.

Had the same with my work MBP. Started about 6 weeks into using it, went to the Apple Store and got told it would take at least 14 days. Asked them for an exchange device so I could keep working and they almost laughed at me.

I bought mine on an American Express credit card which, in the UK, has what's known as "Section 75" protection. This alone means I can return it for a full refund since it is a defective product within the warranty period with documented design flaws. If Apple refuse to issue the refund, then Amex will do it for them. Obviously it will need persistence and a bit of a fight - but the law is 100% on my side.

If your machine is 6 months old, you have a 2018 MBP keyboard. The 2019 keyboard came out 4 months ago.

That is true. I did not realise this, so thanks. Indeed it says mine is a 2018 model in the "About this Mac" screen.

All this time I thought I had a 2019 model because I ordered it in 2019 and it came direct from the factory in China (not from existing stock).

Same here. I just got a 2019 MBP to replace my 2014. I type without looking and I find the keyboard very pleasant (I love the soft click feel and sound). Now I can’t say for the durability but first impression is very good.

I have a 2019 (I think) model and I really enjoy the typing experience.

The vast majority of impressions I've seen are about how the keyboard mistypes or breaks. It's not necessarily about it feeling worse - it is worse in aspects that don't directly related to how it feels to type on it. The keyboard rage is entirely justified if such an expensive device has keyboard problems that are unsolvable. It's really not helpful to dismiss the issues and people's opinions just because you happen to think typing on the keyboard is fine, no idea what anybody is complaining about, everybody is exaggerating and out of their minds.

I don't think most of the comments are directed at the 2019 model. Most even specify an earlier (2018) model. These have known issues. So I think that is "approaching absolute truth".

I personally have reduced my participation due to said echo chamber. If you want to have comments voted there is a pretty easy formula to follow.

Is that anything more than a rumor yet?

This is Apple, there's nothing more than rumors until the announcement.

Good point - but with Apple, you're never going to have any concrete information until the day a product is officially released. Rumors are as good as we can get, and 9to5mac is pretty reputable, as far as those sites go.

According to macrumors the source of this rumor has been reliable.

Great, will they be offering free trade-ins? These are $2000 computers that have a major broken component. Not to mention, the second a computer comes on sale that doesn't have this issue, the resale value of the current MacBooks will be disproportionately affected compared to previous revisions. So a nice double whammy: a miserable experience during its use, and an unusually small resale value afterwards.

This is a company that renders many of its perfectly working phones and tablets virtually worthless via centralized cloud account locking that is easily forgotten and left on. I doubt they care about resale value.

That’s a great anti-theft feature actually

“Virtually worthless [to thieves but not the rightful owner.]”

Doesn’t Google do the same?

yes they do

When you reset an iPhone or iPad it always prompts you for the iCloud password to remove the lock. eBay also gives you the same reminder. The only way you're selling iCloud locked devices is if you're usually too lazy to reset or it's a stolen device. (Though other situations happen - I recently sold some iPhones for my wife's family, which belonged to someone who died of Alzheimers)

You think the company that makes you buy an extra 'fuck you' dongle to plug in your brand new phone into your brand new computer will let you trade up?

Sorry if you already bought the lemon model. I'd sell before the new one drops to take less of a hit if I were in your shoes.

Don't forget makes you buy a monitor stand separately for that few thousand dollar monitor

"makes you"

huh..

I get it's an easy target to make fun of, and it's probably over-priced, but the concept of a separate stand is not entirely unreasonable (especially as many "pros" already have stands they like). At least they're offering a VESA adapter, though it's stupid to charge $200 for it.

Meh. That’s an incredibly high end reference monitor targeted at a niche set of high end video producers that already overwhelmingly prefer to rack mount their reference monitors.

Most of the target market doesn’t need or want that stand.

Most of the should-be-targeted market just wants a $1500 retina display.

LG sells a perfectly good one for $1299 that Apple also sells in their stores. They are very good displays.

I find their asymmetry to be ugly and visually distracting: there's no excuse for the "chin" on the top of the monitor - I'm surprised Apple OK'd the design at all - and just-as-surprised that they didn't equal-out the bottom bezel of the display in the new 2019 revision just to make it seem balanced.

Also, the fact it's a single-input monitor without HDMI input is a deal-killer for me: multiple-input monitors are fantastic when you have multiple machines on your desk and alternate between them based on the current job (e.g. laptop in docking station, Mac Mini for Safari + iOS testing, main desktop, dangling HDMI cable for connecting to tablets and phones).

No, they are not. As an owner of LG OLED TV, I know it for sure.

LOL, dear downvoters, tell me more about my TV, muhaha.

I have an LG tv and have no problems, but not regarding that, Apple uses LG displays on their macbooks and ipads (not sure about the 5k imac). This is probably why you are being downvoted.

And I have LG TV and have problem, so what, lol? "I don't want to believe they can be bad"? Muhaha!

At least try to google first how many people have issues with LG monitors.

A not insignificant number of fans will buy it anyway.

Nah, they give you a $1000 discount on the monitor if you already own a stand.

You plug your phone into your computer?

~~Deploying and debugging iOS apps is still not available via wi-fi I believe.~~ Edit: added xcode 9.

Yes it is

You have to plug it in once to enable this, so you still need a dongle or cable.

I'm all aboard the USB-C train though, if only Apple would switch the rest of their lightning stuff over.

Since that's not happening, here's hoping that this year's iPhones finally ship with a USB-C charger and USB-C to Lightning cable in the box.

As a sometime mac diehard (iOS & Mac developer, ObjC enthusiast), I find it a little hard to imagine how anyone could continue paying through the nose for Apple's dreadful hardware at this point. A reasonable platform conservatism did encourage me to consider another mac when my 2013 MB Pro outlived its usefulness, but only briefly.

Shame. Last time I used it (early 2018) I still found OS X to be have the best overall balance of good to bad things (no current OS is exactly 'good'). But the hardware is a complete deal-breaker.

The software is becoming a deal-breaker as well. Every upgrade seems to break things to the point that I don't even upgrade anymore.

I've also felt that window management is better in Windows than in OS X. Multitasking feels faster and more intuitive on Windows 10.

Fair enough - I'm a bit out of touch with current OS X. Windows has some pluses but lots of downsides too. Same for Linux. They're all an unhappy compromise from my perspective. I've reached a stage of frustration with the dreadful desktop OS scene that I now invest as little as possible in any of them. I keep my data portable, use x-platform apps as much as I can, and generally keep the OS, as far as I'm able, to be just a file store and app launcher.

To be fair they are offering free keyboard replacement.

And they replace it with a keyboard with the same design flaws. I have replaced mine several times now and am left without a computer for a week every time.

I'm hoping t get Hackintosh running on a lenovo yoga so I can replace my keyboard one last time and sell the POS.

Don't. I've made the mistake of building a hackintosh out of 'Golden Build' list of seemingly issue-less components and it's a world of hurt. Every now and then something doesn't work (BT, Wi-Fi, GPU, random OS freezes) and there's no real way to fix it, the usual advice is to replace component and/or reinstall the OS. I've wasted so much time on it, that if I'd know it in advance, I wouldn't do it. You've been warned.

And it takes anywhere from <unreasonably long> to <forever> to get it replaced because they basically have to replace the entire laptop just to replace the keyboard.

And the times are worse outside the US.

Mine is less than 6 months old and already at least 3 keys are malfunctioning. The Apple rep reckoned I would be without my machine for at least 3 days - and that is unacceptable as I need it for my work. In the end I bought an external keyboard.

They don't need to offer free trade-in. When the new machine is available I will buy it. Then return this broken one for a full refund. And there are literally half a dozen laws in the UK that entitle me to do so.

I usually use my Macs until I feel an upgrade is worth it (I can sometimes get five years out one), and then upgrade and give the old one away to someone who could use it. The cost for me is really that I'm not going to want to keep my current MBP (bought at the end of 2017) for as long as I usually would, just because they keyboard sucks.

I absolutely agree, they should offer a significant discount to people trading them back in to get a replacement model.

To me the, the worst thing with MacBook keyboards is when keys start to fade out[1]. I really hope they could do something about it

[0] https://caio.ariede.life/macbook-blurred-keys/

Isn't that an issue on all keyboards without doubleshot keycaps?

These problems don't exist on doubleshot keycaps, precisely because of the doubleshot injection.

In this case these aren't double shot, they are single shot that is painted/dyed and then has the lettering laser-etched out of the paint/dye.

Oops, I meant to say non-double shot

God, I hate this. 2018 MacBook Pro, had it less than a year, already getting patches like that on some keys.

I can't believe they aren't double-shot. Or just color the whole thing, like Nintendo did with its switch buttons. Lettering and all, so it never rubs off. That would be the kind of quality I'd expect to see for the price of an apple lap top computer.

My command Key had this after a couple of years on my MBP took it in to the apple store while I was getting my phone fixed, they just stuck in a new key. I believe they have a key board replacement program if your keys are sticking - something I'll probably avail myself of, I have a few keys that don't work sometimes.

Huh, left Cmd button on my MBP 2018 has the same issue. Also double t’s. Also sometimes not working left Shift unless you press it harder. Also partially not working Touch Bar (about an inch of it has turned black and doesn’t display anything).

But they're still keeping the annoying touchbar. I suppose I'm stuck with Dell laptops now.

The Touchbar and the kernel panics in BridgeOS that go with it. That's the hardest thing to swallow.

Mine does this when I use video conferencing.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2018-macbook-pros-crash...

I found the touch bar a hindrance on my 2017 MBP. Then I read a HN comment [1] recommending Better Touch Tool [2] with GoldenChaos config [3]. I've found it quite useful since.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20229123

[2] https://folivora.ai/

[3] https://goldenchaos.net/goldenchaos-btt.html

Do these fix the kernel panic "BAD MAGIC" error that causes the machine to crash and restart? These are kernel panics caused by the BridgeOS, a mini-operating system that drives the TouchBar.

My problem isn't with the usability or usefulness of the TouchBar. My problem is that the mere presence of the TouchBar has created a point of failure that crashes the machine... when I'm not even using that feature!

No it does not my mistake, I replied to the wrong parent comment.

At least with Dell's on-site service, I have had two keyboards fixed for me at my desk in about about 5 minutes.

that's good to hear. I've been wanting to upgrade from my 2013 model, but the keyboards are so shit that I decided to wait.

Might still not buy one if they still have a Touch Bar though (and omg, touch bar was automatically made uppercase...)

Apple, I love you, but I hate you too.

What about if they have a touch bar but also have a hardware escape key? That's really the only thing about the touch bar Mac keyboard layout that I hate. (I don't actually mind the feel of the butterfly keys -- I'm typing on them now -- but I don't love them, either. Although if they kept this key feel, maybe just doubled the travel, and brought the reliability back in line with the older scissor switches, I'd be totally on board.)

Remap caps lock.

I've gone back to remapping caps lock as a control key recently, so the two hacks conflict. :) (I know there are ways to remap the caps lock key to be both, depending on whether you tap it or hold it down with another key.)

Remap control to escape!

I wish I could remap my MBP arrowkeys to grow up and be full-sized keys...

Well, you're at least halfway there with the butterfly keys, since their left and right arrow keys are full-sized and only the up and down keys are half-height! Mac laptops previously have had half-height arrow keys literally for two decades, going back to 1998's PowerBook G3.

Yeah, I could deal with the touch bar if they had a physical button for the ESC key.

I'd love it if they simply re-issued the 2013 model. I have a 2013 MacBook Pro and it has been great. Every iteration since then has been worse (keyboards, batteries, touchbar, etc).

Logic Pro is the only thing that might force me to by an inferior current model Macbook if my 2013 model croaks. I'm about to start experimenting with Ardour to see if my Logic Pro dependency can be removed.

The worst thing is, the 2015 MBP keyboard was nearly perfect. The vast majority of the time I don't even use an external keyboard even when I am working at a desk and am plugged into monitor.

It's one thing to fail at designing something because it is hard and you haven't figured it out yet. It's quite another to regress to incompetence on something you already perfected.

The 2015 MBP is great! I have a spare one stockpiled.

I wish they would keep it basically as-is, replace one of the (generally unused) thunderbolt ports with a USB-C port, add their secure enclave T2 security chip, and update the CPU/chipset. Maybe even add FaceID...

All I want is 32G memory. Literally just do that, keep everything else identical and I will spend $3k to buy a new one.

I think the late 2011 unibody is the best Macbook they ever made. Easily opened up, with nearly everything replaceable. Pleasant to work with. Their last lineup that had a 17 inch model available. Only downside: noisy fans. I replaced them, bit that didn't fix it. Give me one with quieter fans and maybe a slightly more up to date processor, and I'm happy.

Frustratingly, to me at least, that one didn't have an HDMI port, requiring a dongle.

True, it didn't. I've got a couple of different dongles for it. I would really prefer my next laptop to have a real HDMI port.

Yeah, um, I’m 50/50 about the T2. I’ve found it quite easy to brick the mid 2018 mob.

USB C replaced MDP as the connector for Thunderbolt so I guess that part would get an update in any case

I am rocking 2015 15" and I fear the moment when it breaks.

I work daily with 2015 MBPs, and I agree the keyboards are good. But every day I also miss the keyboard of my burnt out 2011 MBP. In my 20 years of using macs, that one and the 2012 generation had the best combination of crisp resistance + travel.

I totally agree. Just this year I bought a new computer and chose a refurbished 2015 MBP based almost entirely on the keyboard.

Completely disagree, keys were too heavy and keyboard was too far back. Love the new keyboard. Eh to each their own I guess.

I agree. I don't think I'll ever beat my 2015 MBP.

Seriously, the thing is a workhorse. I consistently run 4 screens while streaming Twitch/Youtube, running 1 or 2 emulators, 2 IDE's, and dozens of Chrome tabs. Thing only slows down on hot days when it can't cool off well enough.

2015 MBP was the last best laptop.

I've been suffering with a 2018 MBP as well, and I'm done. The Touchbar and the arrow keys are killing me.

I'm giving them one more chance to fix their mistake with the 2019 MBP which should be announced in the next few weeks, otherwise I'm, going to a Vaio.

Can't agree.

Coming from a Thinkpad (the standard for what makes a great keyboard), PowerBook Titanium (keyboard was bad, but nothing like the 2016/17 MacBook Pro), PowerBook 12 / 17 (my favorite), and the first MacBook Pro (still pretty great) everything starting with the unibody has been downhill. Ever since, the keyboard and I believe battery even have not been user replaceable. There was a time one could walk into an Apple Store and actually purchase the battery in a box off the shelf, take it to the counter and buy it like any other product.

I have a 2017 and 2018 15 inch MacBook Pro. The 2017 is almost unusable. The 2018 is much better relatively. I also had a 2015 13 inch. Can't say the keyboard was great on that either.

I've been tempted to try retrofit a 12 inch PowerBook with more modern parts like the devoted Thinkpad users have done.

The pre-chiclet keyboards were okay for their era but the <=2015 chiclet design is just so much more comfortable because of the lack of sharp edges and does a much better job at keeping dust out than the old open design.

I did well with keyboards on the old powerbook g4, and the 1st gen intel macbook pros. Once they went chiclet, I developed wrist fatigue, finger pain, and other issues. They are an ergonomic nightmare scenario for me, and are basically unusable undocked for any significant length of time. I imagine the new models will be even worse.

no. I think the original first gen macbook pro keyboard was really good.

- The keys were shaped to match the curve of your finger

- the stroke distance was very nice

- escape key

I think it started going downhill with the flat keys. Your fingers could not feel the key edges, would therefore not center, and you would mistype.

The current-gen keys are shaped. Subtly, but it's there.

I've tried it, but (for me) it's not enough to feel, and it doesn't help with comfort (which is better if the keypress force acts on the entire finger)

Even the little things are inferior on the modern MBP compared to 2015. I use both and have noticed that when you plug headphones into a 2015 the switch over from (muted) speakers to mid volume headphones is instant.

On the USB-C version there is a 1.5 to 2 second lag where if you turn the volume up you'll actually be turning the volume up on the speakers because it takes that long to switch audio sources.

No longer feels like a premium machine.

Recently my b key started to exhibit the same symptoms on my 2016 model. I avoided having to use the keyboard at all costs because it's a serious impedance to my productivity and it still happened to me.

What's most infuriating is the realization that I bought a $3000 laptop with a keyboard that will break sooner or later and there's nothing you can do about it except sell it at a substantial loss. Even if I go through all the trouble of having it fixed under the extended waranty program I'm still without a laptop for at least a week and I know it will happen again because the design is fundamentally flawed.

What is more astounding to me is not the fact that it happened, but that apple did nothing about it. Years later they are still selling a broken device, and people are still buying it.

I refused to upgrade due to touch bar/esc key absence and the keyboard fiasco is a big no for now. I did hope for a major redesign this fall, but it seems I will have to wait much longer.

Macbook Pro has been my companion since 2005 and I feel like Apple is doing everything they can to make me switch to Linux. My current, fully loaded 15 inch MB Pro from late 2013 started having serious battery issues and I hope it will survive until redesign is introduced. Although given the recent breakthroughs in Apple product lines I suppose they will drive me even further away from them :-(

You can replace the battery on older macbooks fairly easily. Unfortunately now they glue them down so hard it's easier to just throw out the laptop.

It's $199 for a battery replacement. Not cheap but given that you pay for a 95wh battery, a new keyboard, a new trackpad, a new topcase and warranty that's a pretty good deal. Your MacBook Pro will be as good as new.

The price for the replacement is also higher if your battery isn’t actually in need of replacement. Basically apple subsidizes (compared to their higher pricing anyway) the other parts when replacing the laptop body to get the battery replaced.

you can change your battery, of course. Also, it is sometimes possible to buy refurbished 2015 models directly from Apple, which is what I intend to do if September models aren't a serious improvement over current offerings.

Because, even with all current Apple semi-hate, nothing beats usability of OS X. And 2015 MBPs were (are) great.

> nothing beats usability of OS X

I used to share same opinion, but Windows 10 is surprisingly good nowadays, I didn't expect it to be so nice to use.

Ads in start menu? Apps installed without my consent? No, thank you

Never experienced it. I don't advertise Win10, so no need for aggressive "no thank you", I don't give a fuck if you will use it.

If by "ads in start menu" you mean the lame app suggestions, it's trivial to disable the thing.

by your logic, any ad can be reframed as "a lame suggestion". They're still ads, though, and still very unwelcome. And last time I checked, there wasn't a switch to easily turn them off, completely and permanently.

While I admittedly can't remember what I did exactly in order to switch them off at the beginning... I'm not seeing any, ever. So clearly I must've used such a switch

This gets said about 5000 feature on windows. A good OS doesn't require you to spend an hour turning off 400 toggles only to have them turn back on in an update

Sure it's not 4999, exactly 5000? And number of toggles is exact, not an exaggeration? Because if we will exaggerate MacOS issues, who knows the winner of this game.

Just for note: I use them both (win and macos).

Because they're buying it. The failure rate must not be impacting their profits, or people buy a new MacBook before the keyboard breaks, again not impacting their sales.

True, and it really shows the downside of vertical integration for users.

Tying yourself to a particular software ecosystem turns into a bit of a lottery if it means you're left with exactly one totally broken laptop keyboard option for years and years.

Even ignoring the actual brokenness, using a keyboard with very little key travel is just not everyone's cup of tea.

It really makes me think hard about whether or not I want to take this risk again, not just for laptops but for phones as well.

These products spend years in development. They are doing something about it but it takes time. Apparently the all new designs, to start release this fall, will address many of these issues. If they don't, I to will be furious.

That said, due to the huge list of issue, I probably would have interrupted the normal design cycle and accelerated the new models. But 20/20.

I'm off the Apple train. I honestly don't trust them to make reliable hardware anymore. They've had three years to fix this mess but they have shown zero initiative or intention to do it.

Apple has consistently shown that it cares more about form over function. No one needs their laptops to be any thinner than they already are. And no one needs the useless, expensive touchbar.

I plan to hold on to my 2015 mbp for a couple more years, since it's still functional enough. My hope is that Jony Ive leaving Apple might lead to some improvements, though I'm doubtful since Apple will still depend on his design firm.

I just bought a second hand 2015 macbook pro and I hope it will last me years. But I was looking at Surface books and unless something changes, I too will be off Macbooks. Which sucks because if I could just keep the exterior and have better cpu+ram+hdd, I'd be perfectly happy.

I have a Surface Pro 4, and I like it but have a warning: Surface devices cannot be repaired. At all. If anything goes wrong with your Surface Book, you only option is to swap it out with a refurb. If you're out-of-warranty, this costs $600 for the Book.

>Apple has consistently shown that it cares more about form over function. No one needs their laptops to be any thinner than they already are

Well, this depends.

Here's how a user put it: "I have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air - even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don't think I'm unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light. (...) A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit)." - Linus Torvalds

(Later he stopped using Apple laptops for the even lighter/thinner chromebooks).

I wonder what Linus would have made of the Compaq Portable or an Osbourn 1 back in the day.

He would have made do, for lack of alternatives (and a lack of technology to make things lighter then).

But that's hardly a justification when alternatives exist and the technology allows it.

There are two types of laptop users - those wanting a portable machine, light, good enough for a short amount of ssh or vim and maybe a webpage or two

The other type are those looking for a luggable desktop, those who hotdesk but don’t really work on the go.

There’s then who want both, but that has proven to be a mugs game. No matter how much money you throw at it you end up with compromises on portability it power.

I for one stick with a 2015 era desktop and a 2013 11” MacBook air and don’t have problems.

Nah, I don't fit into either of your categories. I'm perfectly happy with my 2015 13" MBP; I use it as my main machine, every day, doing my job as a dev: most of the time, at home, it's driving two monitors (and acting as a third screen itself), though right now I'm working in a cafe for a change. In both circumstances it's a great, sufficiently powerful, nice-to-use machine which I'm productive on. Getting this right _is_ possible. I do fear the day I have to "upgrade" though...

For a 13 inch or smaller laptop it is understandable to strike a balance between size, battery and specifications.

A 15 inch laptop is never going to be portable or easy to carry. We don't care about thickness. Just make it a bit thicker to add a full-travel keyboard.

>A 15 inch laptop is never going to be portable or easy to carry. We don't care about thickness. Just make it a bit thicker to add a full-travel keyboard.

Well, I don't like the new keyboard, but I sure like my laptop thin and lightweight, and I use a 15.

Thin laptops do suck. Give us ports and keyboards! Is there a single instance of high-quality laptop on the market with a generous key travel these days? Thinkpads don't quite reach the feel of MBP 2015 keyboard for me.

(Typing this on a 101-key NMB I restored which, I think, is close to typing nirvana.)

> "Thinkpads don't quite reach the feel of MBP 2015 keyboard for me."

They don't? I was under the impression that Thinkpads generally had the best keyboards. They get praised for it all the time. Are current Thinkpad keyboards actually worse than 2015 Macbook ones?

Are keyboards a piece of technology that's getting worse instead of better as time goes on?

It's super subjective.

I have two Thinkpads that I use frequently. One is a T520 with the traditional Thinkpad keyboard and the other is a Yoga S1 with the island keys. I prefer the newer keyboard (island or chiclet keys) by a mile.

I ended up looking for a similar desktop keyboard and ended up with the Logitech K750.

ThinkPads have better keyboards than most, but Lenovo decided to join the chiclet camp a few years back and the recent keyboards haven't been as good as ThinkPads from eight or ten years ago.

Is it just the chiclet form? I thought it was mostly the technology underneath the key: the travel, resistance, etc, that matters. Those can still be good or bad regardless of the shape of the keys themselves.

There are different use cases for different laptops. I can certainly see the advantage of a laptop that's as light as possible, but that's never going to be a 15" laptop. On the other hand, some people want lots of power or a massive screen, and then making it as thin as possible just makes no sense.

The real problem IMO was a change in Apple’s segmentation.

It used to be the Pro (PowerBook) was targeted towards Pro users, and the regular MacBook (iBook) was targeted towards consumers. This also nicely aligned with price segmentation, but that was secondary. The focus was on pro vs consumer. Then Apple added the Air, where the focus, as the name implies, was on thinness.

At some point, however, these categories became less of a distinction between the targeted consumer which happened to align with price segmentation, but instead became all about price segmentation itself. I think that’s where the devices went off the rails. The Pro in MacBook now basically just means this is the most expensive machine in the Apple lineup...

All the lines basically have the same priorities now, with the only difference being the manufacturing budget, which determines what features are available.

Why is a very lightweight 15" laptop out of the realm of possibility? It's not like displays today are inherently heavy. If OLED panels become viable for notebooks, they weigh nearly nothing, but even with existing LCDs with LED backlighting, those don't weigh much either. They do need to pay attention to making the case rigid across a larger area, but that ought to be possible without adding too much weight given modern materials. The LG Gram 15 only weighs 1.1kg, for instance.

It's possible of course, but it's a compromise between weight and screen size. Even a 17" laptop can be light, as the LG Gram 17 proves. Though it's not very rigid, from what I understand.

But if weight is your primary concern, it makes more sense to go for a small screen. If you go for a larger screen, you're already accepting a bit more weight. How much depends, but personally I'd expect a laptop that sacrifices weight for a larger screen to also sacrifice some weight to have a slightly better keyboard.

It really depends on the user. I carried a zbook15 with charger which was around 6-7kg then. The laptop itself was crap, but I didn't care about the weight/thickness at all. And it could actually pull a number of heavy virtual machines without issues, which Chromebook just wouldn't be able to.

But people will have different expectations / idea of comfort.

I think the problem is deeper - their largest customer base probably cares about those things - have you seen how many people now days use MB for office work ? It became a status symbol, keyboard issues aside - they will be perfectly happy if their machine thermal throttles at 50% load because they never even hit 50% load. And it being thicker a few mm. to get proper thermals is a big deal to that audience (my impressions from talking to a few).

I was unfortunate enough that I needed to get a Mac and since I wasn't paying I went for I9 2018 MBP with Vega - this thing sucks horribly - it overheats constantly, blows loudly, the OSX is very unstable - common freezes and getting my 5K thunderbolt monitor to work reliably is a PITA - pray it doesn't lockup on monitor plugin or that it detects the monitors USB hub without a restart - I had to go to a beta to get support for it when I bought it... And not to mention no touch option in a 4k$ device !

Lenovo X1 Carbon running windows is far superior experience for me. Also a big fan of Yoga line for more casual use - GF has one and going from random typing to tablet in bed or in chair is amazing and pair surfing with touch on a large screen is a great experience.

I've been looking at Yoga devices, but holding one in tablet form, my fingers were groping in the keyboard on the back: not exactly comfortable. How is that experience for you?

I'm strongly leaning towards a Thinkpad as replacement for my old Macbook, also because of their excellent keyboards. The only downside is that they don't have a 17" laptop without a separate GPU.

Apple has insulted users and embarrassed itself with this dogshit keyboard and the pathetic emoji bar... on a $4000 "pro" computer, no less.

Then there's the glued-together chassis, the soldered-in RAM and drives... when those go bad (and they will), you get to just throw the computer away instead of performing a routine replacement.

Apple's shoddily-made computers should be hanging from pegs in blister packs at Walgreen's.

It's too bad that Apple has given up on real computers. And Windows is a pathetic mess... so in the end, computers are returning whence they came: to the domain of scientists, hobbyists, and other serious users.

I didn't realize how great upgradable components really are until recently. I had a 2.5 year old Lenovo laptop with a fast processor (i7 at 2.8Ghz). Upgraded the RAM to 16GB and replaced the HDD with a SDD. The thing now runs way faster and feels brand new.

Ayup. Finally broke down and bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon 7th Gen running Windows 10 and Debian dual booted.

I have a useful keyboard, Bluetooth that doesn't randomly die, graphics drivers that don't suck and a MATTE SCREEN. I didn't even realize that you could get a laptop with one anymore--I practically cried tears of joy when I opened it up and didn't see a reflection in the screen.

I'm slowly transitioning off of my 2015 Macbook Pro Retina to Linux on the Lenovo. I've had a few issues, but I can't say that my OS X experience has been all roses either. The OS X machine randomly loses Bluetooth, drops my printer at irregular intervals, and occasionally won't find my monitor's highest resolutions.

To be honest, Linux really isn't that much more annoying than OS X anymore. Linux has gotten better, but OS X feels like it has gotten a LOT worse.

> MATTE SCREEN

Some of the old thinkpads had a display where you could turn off the backlight outside and use the sunlight.

What train are you boarding on ?

Apple was an oasis of reliable design because short of Lenovo and Dell other brands were horrible in critical ways(e.g. no decent *nix support, or lack of decent international keyboard), and Thinkpads have a very opinionated design to put it mildly, leaving only Dell for a lot of us.

I kinda hate the current crop of MacBooks, but I am not sure I want a Dell either. For people listening to ATP, I see it as the same issue as John Siracusa and his Oxo cheese grater, there's just no obvious good replacement.

What's wrong with Dell? Their XPS and Precision lines are good, and have Linux support.

You should still get it fixed because the newer ones are at least a bit improved. I have a 2016 which has been heavily used for 2 years and a 2017 from work and both keyboards still work fine. So it's not that every keyboard breaks, but I have seen cases in my company as well, but we have hundreds of them here.

I switched to a Thinkpad after I had the horror of using a new Macbook. Running Ubuntu is lovely, so much so that for a developer there is little reason to be using a Macbook anymore. You can get a lot more bang for the buck using a Thinkpad AND have a functional keyboard.

Apple should be very worried. Once they loose the developers, users won't be long to follow.

Why do you say that? Honest question - nowadays it seems like most users are just using web apps, so less need for native apps anyway. Plus the users are still there, so I'd think market forces would keep highly-used native apps going anyway.

Users will soon learn you can get the same (or better) experience with cheaper hardware.

Developers are generally the first to notice such things.

People who are serious about their tools tend not to use web apps as much.

Dell XPS15 with Ubuntu has literally been my best developer environment ever.

Unfortunately my current gig is all MBP and I feel completely handicapped, even after many months - to the point I have resorted to a "proper" mechanical keyboard.

I find the XPS has a disappointing keyboard actually.

Yup, I've had my XPS15 for over 3 years and the keyboard (and webcam) are the weakest elements. The keyboard still feels terrible...somehow it has the worst of both worlds, poor key travel and too large a spacing between keys. Typing has always felt very awkward. In comparison, I absolutely love the Surface Pro 4 keyboard which has wonderful key travel and spacing.

I absolutely agree about the Surface Pro 4 keyboard: I've been using one as my personal laptop for the last 3,5 years and I absolutely love it. Although I must say the keyboard on my girlfriend's Surface Laptop feels slightly better though.

I use a MBP at work and an XPS 13 at home and much prefer the latter - Ubuntu with a Plasma desktop makes for a crazy configurable UI.

Plasma (KDE) sucks at handling multiple displays. I had to learn this the hard way. It's OK if you only ever use the laptop screen.

On the other hand, it seems totally fine with multiple displays on a desktop, or a laptop used as if it's a desktop. Is it live plugging and unplugging that causes problems?

Another way around this for power users and devs that a lot of people seem to overlook is to get a 6-core Mac Mini and a mechanical keyboard. With a retina monitor, it's a great combination.

As a touch typist and massive terminal keybindings user, I won't compromise on the keyboard. Apple needs to wake up and realise which slice of their market they are alienating. I'd say it's the most important one—the developers and creators. There's a sense that at Apple HQ right now, the "Pro" in "MacBook Pro" no longer means "professional" but rather "prosumer." That is wrong, so a major course correction is in order before creative types start fleeing the brand in earnest (judging by this thread and others, they may have already).

> With a retina monitor, it's a great combination.

Sadly, the Retina monitor segment is a complete failure. Several 5K screens came out in 2015, along with the 27" Retina iMac, ... and then the market died off. The UltraFine 5K is finally available again, but it's being sold at 2015 prices (1400€ here). At that point you might as well get an iMac with eight cores, a dedicated GPU, and a semi-replaceable hard drive instead of the Mini.

In an ideal world, we'd have 8K ultrawide Retina displays by now. Sigh...

In that scenario though, wouldn't it be better to wait a little while until 5k monitors price drop?

I feel like I've been seeing this trend as well. I've got an DELL XPS15 and I love it (4-5 years old now)ーgreat keyboard.

But, for anything that needs good GPU performance, they still hold the upper hand in hardware-software working in tandem, it's hard to get the same performance out of anything else.

I wish I could get issued a Linux Thinkpad, but still no support from the IT org :(

BYOD it!

My company laptop is just used for Skype meetings. The real work happens on my ThinkPad.

Although now that enough people have copied my approach it has now been grudgingly approved by IT.

Mac to Dell/Ubuntu here and completely agree. I can understand if you need some media creation applications sticking with Mac (although I'd switch to Win10), but as a fellow developer it has been awesome. I mean I'm completely shocked how I don't even remotely miss anything from Mac. Well, ok, not quite true - Macs have a slightly smoother UI which I like and a bit better fonts, and I miss 1 or 2 trackpad gestures. But everything else is equal on Ubuntu or better. I ran into 2-3 problems that needed some non-trivial linux admin, so I'm not advocating it for non-tech person usage.

The only irritation about the experience is when you switch windows and touch the touchpad, it forces a quick scroll down the page. It used to be maddening, but I found one "fix" that made it happen less frequently.

Otherwise, it's by far my favorite dev environment I've had in my 30+ year career! Well, except for maybe my first job using a Wang terminal, if only because I enjoyed telling coworkers I needed to get back to my Wang. Lots of Wang jokes.

> I can understand if you need some media creation applications sticking with Mac (although I'd switch to Win10), but as a fellow developer it has been awesome

I believe you also need it for ios/iphone development not sure about osx dev though.

How's the touchpad?

That's literally my biggest hold up. I haven't seen anything that holds a candle to Mac's touchpads yet.

Not OP but the trackpad on the Thinkpad X1/P1 is still not good compared to the MBP. It's small (much smaller than the 2015 MBP). Because it has a hinge, you have to either turn on tap-to-click (which has poor palm rejection) or further cut the area where you can click to the bottom half (and deal with variable click strain/travel).

I've heard that Dell makes better trackpads nowadays, but I haven't tried one to verify yet. Regardless, I believe it still has a hinge, so hardware wise I do think the force touch trackpad (and its driver) is still MBP's biggest moat.

The Surface line touchpads are the closest I've seen so far.

There are four of us at work that use Linux--the other 30 or so all have MacBooks. There are no converts, either you started a Linux person, or you started a Mac person.

My little Linux enclave has some theories about the cognitive effect of all the polish that you find on Apple products, but we can't separate our biasses from good science, especially because there's nobody to ask that knows both worlds.

So I have a question for all of the converts out there: Does switching between MacOS and Linux have any effect on how you think?

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this, real evidence be damned.

I switched to apple ecosystem because I wanted the UX that just works reliably. MacOS is for me linux with ultrapolished DE. Bonus is that I can work on iOS apps and use Apple Photos which is way better for me than Google Photos. I used Arch Linux for many years before MacOS. I also switched to iPhone from Android. Wanted a phone that works in the same ecosystem (photos...) and is fast, reliable and does not change ux very much with new releases. On android I tinkered with the phone too much, various companies have different ux, and I started to dislike Google very much after they started randomly shutting down services as they like and one year after introducing them.

I switched from Linux to Mac OS as well. First someone paid me to do a low level Mac app, so I bought a macbook white and found out how Mac OS works.

Then one day I was working on my main Linux desktop and something was distracting me. After a while I realized that the "system tray" (or whatever KDE calls it) icons were all removed and readded one by one regularly, instead of just being updated in place. The on screen movement was significant enough to steal my attention from the IDE.

I looked up how to build a hackintosh desktop and sadly I've never looked back. I might even replace the hackintosh with a Mac Pro in the next 1-2 years, now that they actually have a Mac Pro again.

UX wise, Mac OS is the least annoying operating system available now. Same goes for iOS on phones. It's bad because there's no competition, but that's it.

However, the keyboard everyone is complaining about IS complete and utter shit if you use the laptop outside a clean room environment.

I've been using my last 3 Apple laptops on the same balcony, and only the 2018 mbpro has keyboard problems. The older ones, including the 10 year old mb white, work just fine(tm) still.

To be fair, you started with arch which requires some attention.

Most professional users use Ubuntu since it's fairly polished and "just works".

I had more problems with Ubuntu (especially after big updates) than Arch. For me Arch, after initial setup, was the closest to "just work" linux of all the distros I tried, and I tried them alot over the years. And when something breaks in Arch, I find it much easier to fix problems with Arch than other distros because they keep things as close to upstream as possible and have great wiki.

The primary difference is whether you think it's alright to spend £35 on a single simple cable or not. Many things that follow simply hinge on that.

Its never this simple.

I switched from 2016 macbook pro to dell xps 13 running linux. I spent 2 weeks tinkering. Trackpad never worked half as good as MBP. The simple act of closing the display lid did not even put the computer to sleep reliably.

I went back and paid the Apple tax.

Edit: BTW, Windows was running OK on that machine. Linux was fucked. I guess Microsoft is doing great work on WSL2. It might be the solution for me eventually.

I've used this exact setup without problems since 2016 now. I had to upgrade Dell's EFI BIOS, upgrade kernels (b/c Skylake), and upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 once it came out. I remember a very early trackpad driver having serious problems with keeping state, but that went away with a driver update within a week. Never got a problem with the lid; maybe check BIOS settings? It's true that the XPS's trackpad and Linux' power management isn't as nice as Apple's (because nobody's is).

I'm on an earlier model (9343 from 2015) and after the first ~6 months of "beta testing" it actually got quite good and reliable... ...until about a few months ago, when - I suspect due to a kernel upgrade to the 5.0 series - it started not suspending on closing the lid. Oh, and I can no longer run Powertop, because then it will not suspend at all.

This is so frustrating about using Linux - you get a random regression and then the only thing you can do is pray that someone will eventually fix it down the line.

I have been running Arch (Gnome/Wayland) on a Dell XPS13 9380 for more than 6 months now without any issue except the fingerprint reader not being recognized.

The Arch wiki page for the 9370 really helped, especially since initially the battery was draining on sleep, not after applying the recommendations.

I dock it on USB-C 3.1 dock. The display switches instantly. The Gnome/Wayland fractional scaling is however not good, the image is blurry. I don't use it.

This might have seemed as a superficial witticism, but it's not meant as one (honestly!).

There's a fundamental difference in approach towards hardware and software that's cultivated slowly, gently, and steadily by Apple. The objective is to shell out money to the company and its ecosystem, and starts with vendor lock-in with proprietary tech and cheap but paid apps in a closed-off app store, to reach to the point of an annual budget for Apple expenditures that follows the latest iterations of their products, which are buffed up with New! Shiny! Features! that aren't much thought out, but are nominally innovative.

Now, if you go the Linux/BSD open source/free software path, you'll be hard pressed to find software to throw money at. Best you could do is donate to support your favourite projects, but that's optional rather than mandatory. After settling down with a nice system configuration, you'll similarly be hard pressed to find reasons to waste money on continued "upgrades", instead opting for something that works, and returning to it. People buying couples (or even stockpiles) of, say, x203's is a good example here. They're not buying the marketed "cutting edge", they're rather opting for something that supports their workflow, at a fraction of a price.

This demonstrates a fundamental difference of attitudes, on the one hand people subscribing to an open-ended channel of (fashionable?) updates in hardware and software, and on the other people maintaining and updating a workflow. Perhaps obviously, I'm viewing this from the slightly biased dev angle (and not necessarily webdev either).

Understandably, video and graphics people may come from different tech cultures and have different expectations, where the Apple way is more or less the only (apparent) way.

TL;DR, I see the Apple mentality as bombastic value inflation with more varnish than wood, while the FOSS camp as gradual value increase albeit with the occasional splinters.

Disclaimer: I do make daily use of my MBA 11" 2013, but I'd be hard-pressed to change it. Yet if I'm forced to, I'd probably not go for lustre, but for something equally functional. (Think of a "My other laptop runs OpenBSD" bumper sticker.) When I need to offload a build cycle that'd take too long on the MBA, I do so on a Fujitsu rather than a Mac Pro.

There you go. Downvote a guy to assure a better explanation.

Yes, absolutely. My sense of beauty goes from focusing on grace to focusing of freedom/story. Both are pretty in their own way, but by choosing to appreciate what they do best I become more aware of one type of beauty over another in all aspects near me.

The ability to modify literally anything you can interact with is amazing on linux.

However.... it's also very time consuming, so I basically never do that.

Linux out of the box without tweaking it will have a lot of behavior you may or may not agree with. I found it to be very difficult to adjust away from the cohesive interfaces found on the mac—you can use readline keybindings on all forms, which only very rarely conflict with application keybindings—and you have the same copy/paste keybindings everywhere you can copy/paste. The system keybindings have been consistent for about as long as I've been alive, I think. The built-in terminal is more than good enough for all my needs, and has excellent keybindings too! I can copy/paste/save/whatever with the same keybindings I use in all my other apps.

In other words, I find the interface to stay out of my way and I can work extremely productively with many windows and processes in flight. It may not be perfect, but dammit, it's about the best level of productivity I can manage, by a large margin.

In GNU/Linux, I'm constantly fighting the interface, so there's an implicit understanding of all sorts of behavior I find very difficult to adjust to. What are those lines under characters in the menu item? Why is my mouse frozen so I can't kill the application that's likely swapping memory? Why does every desktop environment have their own system settings and none of them have a decent gui for configuring trackpad behavior? Why are there two, maybe three different GUI frameworks, and several service layers, so you basically need to install the cores of both major desktop environments to use all the applications? I constantly ran into issues where, for instance, I could configure an app to work with the gnome keyring, but not the kde keyring. It's anarchy in the best and worst way. And don't even get me started on printers, graphics, and wifi drivers. All solvable—eventually. Unfortunately, I only had time for the worst experiences on the clock, and the last thing I wanted to do off the clock was fight the system further. So after two years on linux, after attempting to fight the transition to the touch strip, I switched back.

I did really, really love the paid (pay optional?) app system that was popping up, I found the apps high quality and I contributed to several I "bought", which was an experience that absolutely floored me, and there was some excellent curation involved there on behalf of the folks running the service. Still, the community is still very small.

> Linux out of the box without tweaking it will have a lot of behavior you may or may not agree with

I hear this from people who choose to use arch and Gentoo then complain that Linux requires much tweaking.

Install Ubuntu and be done with it. Or if you want things to work like a Mac, go with elementary OS.

If you still feel it's not _exactly_ to your liking, then I suggest you move back to osx.

> Install Ubuntu and be done with it.

Thinking this is real is a huge problem in the linux community. My entire post was about ubuntu. This is their trackpad guide in 2019: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticsTouchpad

Stuff like that makes me wonder who Canonical's target audience is and who they're testing with.

> Or if you want things to work like a Mac, go with elementary OS.

This is a joke, right? It's basically some high quality apps (I can't emphasize that enough) and a skin. The issue isn't the quality of those apps, it's that the desktop paradigm is fundamentally different and wedded to the PC. I can't understand anyone who claims to have switched and gotten up to productivity within a few years—maybe I've been using macs too long.

Also, this type of hostility has a very chilling effect. I have had good experiences with the open source community personally, but public forums are utterly toxic to people who express opinions about gnu/linux/gnome/kde.

> maybe I've been using macs too long

I think this is the main issue. You want your PC to work exactly like your Mac and are not prepared to learn the way the new system works.

Case in point: a lot of people complain about trackpad issues but Linux/windows do not use mouse gestures. You should learn to use gnome hot-zones and/or keyboard shortcuts because experience have shown us it is more efficient.

Linux is pretty terrible for vision impaired users since at minimum OSX 10.3.

Did you mean "OSX" instead of "Linux" here? If not, I don't understand.

Since the release of OSX 10.3, Linux has lagged when it comes to accessibility for vision impaired users (back then it didn't even have anything to offer).

Linux's accessibility didn't get worse due to a particular OSX release though, so the way you phrased it was quite confusing. I'm not sure you're right, either. Debian seems to have had TTS and Braille device support (including during installation) since before OSX 10.3 was released.

> There are no converts, either you started a Linux person, or you started a Mac person.

That's a clear over generalization. I started with Mac, used everything Mac for about 15 years (various Macbooks, Mabooks Pro, iMacs and one Mac Pro) and then changed to everything Linux about 5 years ago.

I am a scientific researcher, my main activity in the computer is programming, I didn't miss the Mac at all except for a little tool that I used for my personal life (GarageSale) and that I couldn't get anything similar (it's a tool to create eBay auctions in a much easier and nifty way).

Anyway, there is nothing about the Mac itself I miss.

I work on Linux full time at work and use a Mac at home, both primarily for creative work. The Linux experience has some strengths, but you feel required to spend a significant amount of time customising your environment to reduce workflow friction. The Mac is great out of the box, and in general gets out of your way. The basics are rock solid.

I have used both. I had a MacBook at work at a previous job and otherwise mostly Debian. Currently I use Void Linux at home and Debian at work.

I was impressed with the build quality of the Mac at the time (2012 model? 2013?) but as a Unix system it wasn't among the best. No built-in package manager and the popular option, Homebrew, was messy and temperamental. System updates were terrifying because you never knew what it did to software installed with Homebrew. System core utilities are from BSD or BSD like (forks from old versions?). The file system system hierarchy is a bit unconventional if you are used to *BSD or GNU/Linux. The file manager was clunky (though easily "fixed" with a modern Norton Commander clone). In the end I spent most days with a full screen terminal and a full screen browser. One thing I really liked was the touch pad. The motions make sense and it's pleasant to use even for long periods of time. Screen was also nice (retina).

It wasn't a great sense of loss when I turned that laptop back in, though. I bought a refurbished Thinkpad for probably a tenth of the price and was happy with that. I'd never buy a Mac myself. Maybe if I get into iOS development it would make sense, or really need to use Photoshop or some such software. Until then I see no reason to pay the premium, especially now that other manufacturers have high resolution screens. "It just works" is overstated because when it frequently does not in some slightly off-mainstream use case you have browse some Stack Exchange site or some Apple support forum to figure out how to fix it.

> If Apple releases their new Macs with an identical keyboard, then I'm ditching Macs and will pick up a Microsoft Surface Book or something similar. Whatever it is, I'll make sure to pick a laptop that has a god damned functional keyboard.

Same here, MBP keyboards are unbearable. Trying to develop on OSX has become a hassle. Gotta jump through hoops to get gdb to work. Windows with WSL on a Surface Book feels extremely tempting as of late.

I could grab a copy of Windows 10 LTSC and not have to get bothered by untimely updates, Cortana, other bloatware and even telemetry.

Go give windows a try and report back.

I've been using Windows for the past couple of weeks and, granted maybe I haven't really given it a chance, using it after using Macs for 10+ years is not great.

Maybe developing on macOS has become a hassle (I don't see that, but sure), but doing everything on Windows is a hassle. Taking a screenshot. Opening the right file. Displaying UI at a reasonable scale. Think what you want of macOS 'recently', but Windows is just full of bets and decisions that show they're not really concerned about the user experience.

> Displaying UI at a reasonable scale.

It's amazing how bad Windows still is at this. In my experience, connecting monitors of different densities results in crazy things breaking, like the "maximize window" feature.

It's also funny, though, how selectively we remember things.

Only a few years ago Mac multi-monitor support was horrific. You couldn't straddle two screens with a window. And heaven help you if you were dealing with full screen, your second monitor was effectively disabled.

My experience is totally different. I use monitors of different densities every day, and move things between them, etc. Nothing bad happens, and maximising just works.

The only bad Windows density thing I run into is when I occasionally remote desktop into Windows Server 2012, which doesn't know about HiDPI or resolution changes, so if it starts on the wrong screen everything is hilariously tiny. That's fixed in more recent Windows Server versions.

I have a different experience. I connect to 3x HD monitors at work, one of which is portrait. At home I connect to a 3K monitor and a portrait 1980x1200 one. All works flawlessly for me.

> Taking a screenshot. Opening the right file

Former is PrtScn key on my keyboard. Microsoft ships Snipping Tools and lately Snip n Sketch for screenshots - never had any issues with either.

Latter - not sure what you mean - opening the right file as in setting default program to open a file? That's easy enough and it's the best experience on Windows.

PrtScn only if you want to paste it into an image editing program. If you want to save it as file (which is what most people do) than it's some combo. I still remember how it was common for people to send me word files with screenshots pasted, they didn't know better.

Press print screen and it does... I'm not sure what?

I /remembered "Snipping Tool", so I searched for "Snip" and launched that, and it shows a menu that says like "Snipping Tool is deprecated, use Snip n Sketch" so you click that and a new app opens (but old one stays open as well) and you take your screenshot and then its open in a window that you have to go and save.

I know I'm biased because its what I'm used to for 10 years, but on Mac I just have the (insane) cmd + shift + 4 shortcut engrained that'll snip a part of my screen and save to my Desktop. It's just so much quicker than Windows.

re opening file: I miss Quicklook to make sure I have the right file selected. Also miss being able to drag a file into an open dialogue box to select it to open.

> Press print screen and it does... I'm not sure what?

Copies it into the buffer, silently. No notification, nothing. Great UX.

In Ubuntu it's even better, it actually saves it as an image file (and does the annoying shutter effect). But the repeat key is not turned off... so if by any chance you hold it down by mistake, thinking it was the right ctrl, oh boy, you get a shitstorm of shutter effects and dozens of screenshots in the pictures folder. Very annoying. I don't know which I hate more, Ubuntu or Windows.

Out of interest, what keyboard has a Print-Screen key next to ctrl?

Thinkpad T480s, goes space, alt, prtsc, ctrl.

Copies it into the buffer, silently. No notification, nothing.

Do you expect Ctrl+C to not be silent either? Because that's what PrintScreen and all the other clipboard operations were designed as.

Window-Shift-S then click and drag.

Unfortunately it's one of those things that is incredibly useful but isn't mentioned anywhere.

Snipping tool looks like something cobbled together for a capstone project compared to macos shift cmd 4 which doesn't get in your way at all.

It's been largely updated from several weeks (months?) ago (windows shift S now replaces the old snipping tool).

This is actually the one use case where I'm happiest with the Mac + touchbar. OSX lets you screenshot a portion of the screen, a particular window, or the entire screen, and save it to clipboard or desktop, and the keyboard combinations to choose between these are pretty hard to remember.

But the touchbar lets you touch a single button, off-screen, and then clearly choose between these options: https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201361

This is the Windows 7-era way to do this. Hit WindowsKey-Shift-S instead.

Taking a screen shot hard on Windows? Windows-shift-S lets you grab a region vs macbook's shift-command-3 or 4 or 5, or whatever it is (I don't currentlyy have a mac).

anyway, I will say that WSL is a lot better than what we had, but it's no where near as great as terminal working on the Mac. Maybe WSL 2.0 will be better. But I do miss my Mac tooling.

> Windows-shift-S

Thanks, I didn't know about this! I'll give it a go!

I've been using Lightshot to try and make screenshot taking a bit more bearable, but its still no cmd-shift-4 drag region and have a screenshot on my desktop.

I was using Greenshot or Snagit until I learned this recently, myself.

The printscreen button also loads the current screen into the clipboard.

You can find all keyboard shortcuts here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12445/windows-keybo...

Eh, as someone who's primarily used Windows (and a bit of Linux with xfce) for my entire life I find Macs basically unusable (seriously how do I browse the file system). I think it's more of a question of familiarity than anything else.

What do you find lacking in Finder for browsing the filesystem? Also, Spotlight tends to work great for me whereas Windows search almost never finds what I want.

You also have the terminal, so you're free to `cd`, `find`, `locate`, etc...

tab completion also works in Finder. You can open it with command-G

I hear you about Finder. Windows File explorer seems a lot easier and more feature rich compared to Finder. The single most annoying thing is that there is no easy/ obvious way to grab the path to a file/folder in Finder, which seems like the most basic of features. I did figure out a keyboard shortcut at some point, but Finder feels so dated as a file manager.

If the Path bar is visible, you can right-click at any point along the path of the selected file and select "Copy Path." You can also just drag an icon from a Finder window into any window that accepts text, including Terminal, and it'll paste the fully qualified path right in.

I always used to find Windows File Explorer to be the one that was less feature-rich, but I haven't used it in... we'll just say a shamefully long time. But as someone who got used to Macs an equally long time ago, I've wondered if it's because the Mac seemed to make drag-and-drop such a central way of manipulating files and Windows emphasized "select object - select operation" as its central metaphor. If you're used to one way, moving to other system feels weird and clunky.

As a life-long Mac user, I feel the opposite. Whenever I have to use Windows, it feels like Windows Explorer is missing lots of features I take for granted, some that the Mac has had since the 90's. Stuff like spring-loaded drag and drop, directory sizes being calculated in list views, QuickLook... It also has some really braindead design choices like sorting directories separate from files, making navigating with the keyboard a pain (and last I checked, this can't even be turned off!)

To me Windows Explorer feels like it hasn't been updated with modern features since XP, aside from adding the ribbon

Interesting. I use a MBP for work, and hate that Finder intermixes directories and files. I much prefer having directories sorted separately: it makes it easier to drill down through a hierarchy of all the directories are grouped together...

I browse my file system a lot with the keyboard by typing the first few letters in a file name, and if directories are sorted on the top, that means getting to a file starting with the letter "F" is way more difficult when there are also directories named with "F". It also makes things messy when you have related files and folder. E.g. how Firefox saves a website as a "page name.html" and a directory with the assets "page name files". Suddenly these aren't grouped together and copying them together means scrolling back and forth.

At least in the Finder on the Mac you can turn your preferred behavior on (it's in preferences/advanced). On Windows AFAIK there is no setting for it.

> At least in the Finder on the Mac you can turn your preferred behavior on

Per directory. There’s still no way to set the desired view and sorting for the entire system.

And DMGs will open with no toolbar and sidebar.

I don't mean just sorting a window by file type - Finder has a global "Keep folders on top when sorting by name" preference that applies to all windows.

AFAIK there is no way to get Windows to not sort folders on top.

What about sorting by type/kind? Sounds like you might be on sort by none/name...

Finder has a preference item called "Keep folders on top" for both "In windows when sorting by name" and "On Desktop".

> The single most annoying thing is that there is no easy/ obvious way to grab the path to a file/folder in Finder, which seems like the most basic of features.

Right click and hold down the option key, I believe.

I’ll grant you it’s not obvious, but it’s quite easy once you know (as with most things in GUIs): just drag it. You can drag a file/folder from Finder to Terminal or a text editor and it’ll populate the full path.

You can even drag a folder from a Finder window to a save prompt or web browser upload prompt and it’ll relocate you to that directory in the prompt.

The rich drag and drop functionality is one of my favorite features of macOS.

If you're still using macOS/Finder, try entering `defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool true` in Terminal and restarting Finder, it'll show the full path in the title bar.

MacOS shine truly with the adoption of companion apps, like Alfred. Bettertouchtool, Popclip, Fantastical, Post-it apps, Bartender, and others (like totalfinder and totalspace) and the integration of these app in the status bar or finder or even the integration with iOS.

Linux desktop experience and all its software suite are rudimentary compared to MacOS with these additions. I'm coming from there and before that Windows, and MacOS is definitivelly the OS which offer the best desktop experience.

Finder is probably the worst part of using a Mac. But explorer isn’t that much better either

I am currently forced to use windows and it’s near impossible to get anything done with it without feeling frustrated. It simply doesn’t follow my speed and line of thought on anything.

I am quite shocked after using Mac for 7 years how little progress or even regression windows 10 went through. Without making this into a windows bashing thread only the explorer related things I can think of:

- unzip hidden behind right click or freaking menu button. And a dialog with checkbox to “show files after extraction”. Mac: double click. New folder. Done

- rename through right click or f2. Laptop means fn+f2. Mac: press enter, type, done

- quicklook on Mac is the single greatest feature ever. Mainly because it works in file dialogs. Need to upload a file but don’t know which one? Just quicklook. Windows afaik has no equivalent

- somewhat related, maximum length of file paths. There is no excuse for that in 2019. If unzipping fails because of this the software is just plain bad

And this is just explorer which I barely use. Shocking

Interesting! Having used a Mac for 6 months after years of Windows, I had quite the opposite feelings:

> unzip hidden behind right click or freaking menu button

By default double click or Enter will cause Explorer to peak into .zip files, which is more natural to me as I might not want to unzip the whole file to see the contents.

> rename through right click or f2

The fact that in Finder the Enter button does not actually enter a directory or run/open a file but let me rename it was the biggest surprise. I personally rename filesystem objects rarely, while I 'execute' them all the time, it does not make sense!

> quicklook on Mac is the single greatest feature ever. Mainly because it works in file dialogs. (...) Windows afaik has no equivalent

Fully agree - it is a very useful feature. Explorer also has it under 'Preview pane' name, but it's disabled by default. I think that Mac version is better, because if I remember correctly it does preview PDF files, while Explorer does not. Other typical files work fine.

> somewhat related, maximum length of file paths.

Fully agree.

As for QuickLook on Windows I can recommend the brilliantly named "QuickLook": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/quicklook/9nv4bs3l1h4s

> The fact that in Finder the Enter button does not actually enter a directory or run/open a file but let me rename it was the biggest surprise. I personally rename filesystem objects rarely, while I 'execute' them all the time, it does not make sense!

You are right, I hadn’t thought of that. But there is an easy solution that imho in a way is better anyways:

CMD arrow allows you to navigate through file structure including drill down, I.e. open folder.

CMD o opens/runs any file selected (also opens folders so it’s a not-so-elegant replacement for open on enter)

This to me makes more sense though now that I think about it because it differentiates between running (potentially unsafe/slow) and quick keyboard navigation through folders. I admit the CMD arrow functionality is a bit hidden

I feel like much of that is a matter of convention. Why wouldn't you put extract in the right-click menu, which can be extended by any number of applications with whatever useful functions. It's just functional in a way that makes sense.

Renaming with anything other than Enter makes sense because Enter opens the file.

The file path thing is bizarre. Windows 10 supports a path length of 32767 characters. But last I checked you had to change a registry setting before it was the default. And getting W10 to respect a long file path in Python programmatically was a huge pain.

> Renaming with anything other than Enter makes sense because Enter opens the file.

Does it? Enter is “text confirmation, make new line”. With single line inputs it’s expected to work like a submit for e.g. a search. Submitting a file name change happens with enter on windows as well. Now if you rename with f2, then submit with enter and accidentally press enter a single time you suddenly have executed or opened something you only wanted to rename. Enter, the most prominent big button with a single function after space, suddenly becomes a completely orthogonal context sensitive option. That’s weird

And don’t get me started on the use of enter in Microsoft teams based on context of your message...

If you are in a list or ‘’’ code formatted block the first enter will break out and allow you to write plain text below in the same message, the second enter will send the message

> Enter is “text confirmation, make new line”.

Ehm. If you're in the middle of writing text, yes. Which you aren't if you're going through a directory with the explorer. "Enter" also activates buttons. Enter is always context-sensitive. It changes depending on the application and context. I don't see what's wrong with this.

Definitely agree here. I have a 2014 MBP. I can't let go of it. Last year I bought a brand new laptop with Windows 10 on it. I definitely think it is a major improvement over all Windows since XP (better than XP of course too).

I told myself I have to eventually migrate... still hasn't happened. There's just no reason to dive into horrible Pythoning, Dockering, NodeJSing (do I have to bring up Node-Gyp?)

For development Windows has a long way to go, even with WSL.

> Maybe developing on macOS has become a hassle (I don't see that, but sure), but doing everything on Windows is a hassle.

I have Windows installed on a Bootcamp partition on my Macbook Pro. Aside from the hassle and quirks of a different operating systems (coming from MacOS I find Windows extremely lacking in UX), I find perplexing the way Windows handles color profiles. Same computer, same screen, but everything is super saturated in Windows. In some websites with a lot of color in the background it can be jarring.

I run Windows in Bootcamp too, but gods the keyboard and especially the trackpad are horrendous. I have the 2016 model, and hate the keyboard even in MacOS, but it's really obvious that Apple have deliberately crippled the Windows drivers.

I eventually came across trackpad++, which at least renders it usable, but still unpleasant - I travel with a USB mouse these days (sigh, which obviously means a USB dongle for the MBP...).

i'm surprised anyone can develop on a laptop keyboard anyway.

an interesting product would be a keyboard sleeve. it doubles as a carry sleeve when the macbook is closed.

Not really surprising. Old MBA 2013 has an awesome keyboard for coding (and is overall a great terminal device), and the Apple Wireless is identical to some MBA/MBP keyboards. The effective distance between the keys and the overall general width of the keyboard are pretty much en par with "proper" desktop keyboards, with excellent responsiveness and key travel. The MBP 2018 is another deal altogether, obviously. Sad, sad story.

The Surface Book 2's (the model I own) keyboard is probably one of the best laptop keyboard on the market today. Proper key travel and spacing and it's even backlit. I particularly like that they volume controls are on F1-F3 since they plus the Fn key can be operated single-handedly.

I just wish it ran Linux better - I find Windows unusable.

I own a Surface Book 2 and a Surface Laptop 2. Both are amazing but I find the Laptop 2's keyboard better because of the fabric on it (which sounds bizarre).

Either way, except for some Windows annoyances I really don't miss my MacBooks.

When I first got it, it was fantastic, the best laptop keyboard I've ever used - over time the keys have got a little squishy though. Not enough to be an issue but it does make be a bit sad...

I had a Surface Pro 4 before this and the keyboard on that was also amazing despite a much smaller size, and the keys didn't degrade at all.

I love the Surface Book 2's keyboard, but it's trackpad still leaves a lot of room for improvement.

I just installed Ubuntu on mine and after updating the kernel with surface drivers[1] It works surprisingly well (Touch works, detach clipboard, nvidia-gpu, function keys). Its really a great linux machine tbh 1 https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface

I also dislike the keyboards, but it’s not quite enough to prevent me from buying one.

The real showstopper is that the keyboard is an almost certain failure point and fixing it means a multi-week wait. Losing my primary machine for such a long time would be a catastrophe. With Lenovo and Dell, I can easily add a 5 year next-business-day on-site service warranty—for the same price as AppleCare+. But AppleCare has no business-class warranty service options, just shitty mail-in service.

I bought a ThinkPad P1 recently. There was an issue with the touchpad I noticed as soon as I unboxed it. I called Lenovo Premier support, which has no wait time and no phone menu: calls are answered by a highly autonomous support agent (I believe in Florida) who can do whatever is needed to fix the problem. By noon the next day, technician was onsite and replaced the entire top half of the unit (equivalent to the MacBook keyboard repair).

The Surface Book 2 is no question, hands-down one of the best pieces of kit I've ever ever owned, it's a phenomenal machine and I've not regretted moving back to Windows for a single second (except for a decent terminal, but that's almost here too)

Check out Cmder[1]. Best terminal replacement I've used on Windows.

1: https://cmder.net/

Can echo this - I've used it for years on Windows, and find it better than iTerm or anything else on MacOS

When the battery dies on the Surface Book, you won't be able to repair it even at a Microsoft Support center. They will just take it back and offer a cheaper price on a replacement. With an iFixit repairability score of 1, it's ridiculously difficult to do the replacement yourself too.

Having to throw out a fully functional device once the battery goes weak should be a practice that gets banned at least for the sake of the environment.

Microsoft itself does not replace batteries but UBreakIFix will replace Surface batteries for about $200.

>decent terminal

https://github.com/felixse/FluentTerminal is the closest I've found to the feel of the Mac one.

I sold my MBP 2018 13” i5 and the only praise it’ll ever get for me is it’s resale value. I did have the box, and it was in perfect condition, but I almost got it’s original cost when I sold it to a refurbishment place. I replaced it with a Surface Pro 6 13” i5, which I was able to pick up for the money. And what a beast that little machine has been.

I had a few worries going into it. Would it be able to sit on my lap and other laptopy places, was Windows going to be alright, what about development. Stuff like that. It can function as a laptop, in fact it’s probably the best machine I’ve ever had on my legs because the hot part doesn’t touch you. It can’t sit on your chest while you lie down, however, so it’s certainly not a full laptop replacement if you need those positions. Windows with WSL has been amazing though. The only thing I’ve missed from OS/X was iMessage integration, and that was already annoying because more and more of my connections have been switching to android. It’s probably the first device I’ve been genuinely excited about since I got my first smartphone, and ironically it feels like something Apple should’ve made. And not just the design, the ability to isolate your dev environment with suse enterprise is just so much better than containers on os/x. Probably not better than dual-booting if you need more speed, but I don’t.

Switch to Linux! (Yes, I know I'm one of those people.)

Just did. For work it is unbeatable. GUI is not annoying anymore

Which GUI are you using which isn't annoying?

I really like KDE but GNOME is more popular afaik.

Is there a particular distribution's customizations that you like? I've tried Ubuntu/Gnome and Manjaro/KDE and thought both were pretty bad out of the box. I can go into more detail if necessary...

I asked my workplace if I could switch from the new macbook pro with the touchbar I got when I joined to linux on thinkpad (this was after a month of using the macbook pro btw), they agreed and I got an x1 carbon with ubuntu on it.

So much better IMO, just the keyboard alone was worth the switch. I was a little worried I would miss the display but I really don't mind the smaller screen.

No.

The monotony of this complaint is driving me crazy.

It's really simple.

1. If you don't care about MacOS, and want a different keyboard, please buy a Lenovo Carbon X1 and leave us happy Macbook Pro users in peace.

2. If your keyboard breaks, Apple will replace it free. The newer gen keyboards generally don't break.

3. If you really can't type on this keyboard and you really love MacOS, there are lots of decent thin Bluetooth keyboards. Microsoft has a great one. It's a small monetary sacrifice you'll need to make for sticking with MacOS. i.e. something we already do when we buy Macbook Pros ;)

I am getting tired of being sneered at for "clearly not understanding my own interests" because I like my Macbook Pro, have never had a keyboard issue, I LIKE TYPING on the keyboard, and would buy another one.

I do hope they change the keyboard radically in the next release so that the laptop posse finds another issue to rage at.

To paraphrase the words of Michael Bolton in Office Space: “Why should we change when Apple’s keyboard is the one that sucks?”

Sorry, but when you throw around $2000 you'd expect a better product. Especially when you come from an older version of the device. And every customer has the right to complain about this. So no, they won't leave you in peace - they got every right to do so. Apple did a bad thing and took years to recognize it.

(typing on a mechanical keyboard attached to a Thinkpad T480)

Sorry, but Apple did a really great thing with this keyboard. I absolutely love it, and its a shame that its going away because people like to complain on the internet.

which is why the next macbook pro is going back to a scissor design for longer key travel and more reliable performance?

Do you think they’d actually get rid of it if only some people were experiencing this and complaining?

They’re a massive corporation that has realized in some way that it would benefit them the most to move away from that keyboard. They’ve probably seen how much they spend on replacing them and have done user surveys and probably a dozen other things before they reverse a multi year decision that is going to cost them to change their production line for the keyboards.

People rightfully complaining that a grain of sand can stop their kb from functioning correctly.

Typing from my Vortex Race 3 75% w/ cherry pinks

I had someone take a leaf blower and blast dirt and sand all over my keyboard (not on purpose). No issues after I took an air duster to it. This was a new setup and there are sometimes issues with the first generation or two of something. Yes there were issues, but the keyboards are fantastic to type on if you give them a chance.

You seem to be in the minority. I dislike the new keyboard a lot, and looking up info about the new keyboards online almost all of the posts and articles are negative.

https://www.macworld.com/article/3385043/apple-apology-macbo...

https://theoutline.com/post/7315/apple-keyboards-still-suck-...

https://theoutline.com/post/2402/the-new-macbook-keyboard-is...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/01/an-ode-to-apples-awful-mac...

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/macbook-keyboard-flaw-vid...

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/macbook-keyboard-fail

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18284042/apple-macbook-ke...

He’s in the minority only if you count “people who get paid to slag on apple for clicks”.

There are millions of happy MacBook Pro users. Only a fraction have these keyboard issues.

I look forward to the great MacBook Pro exodus of 2020, which is supposedly going to happen if you read all these pundits.

the new macbook pro keyboard sucks and a lot of users are complaining about it. apple should do something, not blame the users. I personally hate it, but I'm stuck with it.

it's not like we have a choice, we use whatever our company gives us and we can't just ask for another keyboard because we don't like our laptop. at least not in my company.

As you elucidate in your first point people can choose with their wallet. However, I think that blog posts and complaints are another, perhaps stronger, way of impacting change. People may still like a product, they may still want to buy a product, so a complaint is the only signal which can let a company know how to improve.

It’s unfortunate that you are getting sneered at for liking the keyboard though. It’s step too far when the complaint targets other users who enjoy the product and doesn’t focus on the product itself.

> 2. If your keyboard breaks, Apple will replace it free. The newer gen keyboards generally don't break.

This is not true. My keyboard broke and has been replaced with the same generation keyboards. I asked the apple store about it before they start any reparation, they told me they would never replace with a newer generation. (MacBook Pro 2018, a few weeks after Apple introduced the new butterfly keyboards.) I am located in Paris, France, if it matters.

You’re not missing out on anything. I have the latest revision of the butterfly design and already had to send in for replacement. The design is useless and none of their bandaid fixes make it reliable.

My right arrow key fails about 50% of the time. I already replaced the keyboard on this (shit) computer once. I use my MacBook professionally for my work everyday. I can’t easily tolerate losing access to this device for days to get the keyboard replaced again...

I spent two weeks working remotely recently and had to use this keyboard rather than my old, excellent, pre-bufferfly switch external Apple keyboard (link for anyone curious — you can still by their old/good usb keyboards on amazon — https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07K7V1FWC?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_...). My hands and fingers were noticeably more fatigued after using the terrible keyboard. My coworkers commented about how much more typos they noticed in slack than normal.

I absolutely hate this computer — not in a “complain about little things that bother me way” - in a “this device is by far the least favorite apple device I’ve ever owned” kind of way. I dislike this computer at every level not because small issues — because of large, major, fundamental problems.

> 1. If you don't care about MacOS, and want a different keyboard, please buy a Lenovo Carbon X1 and leave us happy Macbook Pro users in peace.

I would gladly get a Carbon X1 or an XPS 15 if my work didn't require me to use macOS (or better: if Apple didn't require me to use macOS to build iOS apps). Sadly I can't and so I'm too stuck with a 2018 MacBook Pro and its crappy keyboard

> 2. If your keyboard breaks, Apple will replace it free. The newer gen keyboards generally don't break.

Author's model is, like mine, quite new since it's the 2018 one. It still sucks and it still breaks. Also, I don't want to wait N days for Apple to fix the keyboard.

> 3. If you really can't type on this keyboard and you really love MacOS, there are lots of decent thin Bluetooth keyboards. Microsoft has a great one. It's a small monetary sacrifice you'll need to make for sticking with MacOS. i.e. something we already do when we buy Macbook Pros ;)

My company has already shelled out a couple grands for this machine, suggesting to use a Bluetooth keyboard is offensive given the price point of this laptop and how cumbersome and uncomfortable using an external keyboard on a laptop is.

> I am getting tired of being sneered at for "clearly not understanding my own interests" because I like my Macbook Pro, have never had a keyboard issue, I LIKE TYPING on the keyboard, and would buy another one.

I'll be honest: I don't care how you use your MacBook and I'm ok if you don't care how other people use them. But with a machine at this price point, which is also labeled _Pro_, an issue like this after three product releases is completely unacceptable

I agree with your general point, the last three generations of MBP keyboards are unacceptable, but just because something has "Pro" in it's name, doesn't make it professional or enterprise or mil spec.

I agree, I too think naming something "Pro" is stupid (especially when you don't have a "non-Pro" counterpart). It just adds a pinch of irony to the whole situation: they're selling it as a professional machine, and it can't stand normal use by a large part of people who use it professionally without failing hard

>> after three product releases

Four. Don't forget the 2015 MacBook Retina.

You're right, I've had completely forgotten that one!

> my work

That’s a lot of words to express that you never feel truly free.

"What I do daily so I can pay rent and eat" sounds better?

> My company has already shelled out a couple grands for this machine, suggesting to use a Bluetooth keyboard is offensive given the price point of this laptop and how cumbersome and uncomfortable using an external keyboard on a laptop is.

I'd honestly describe using the built-in keyboard (and especially trackpad) on most laptops as cumbersome and uncomfortable.

Unless you really need to have a mobile workstation - running between meetings, conference rooms, into lots of labs/industrial environments where you can't bring a laptop cart with monitor/keyboard...why would you not dock the machine?

Even if you prefer the feel of the keyboard or trackpad, wouldn't you want the ergonomics to be better than a laptop if you're working on it all day? A pair or trio of 20+ inch displays mounted just below eye height at about reach distance, ergonomic keyboard with elbows at about 90 degrees, and full size mouse will always be a better workstation than the nicest laptop keyboard, trackpad, and 15" display hinged to said keyboard.

> I'd honestly describe using the built-in keyboard (and especially trackpad) on most laptops as cumbersome and uncomfortable.

I somewhat agree given the topic, but I think carrying, having to charge and balancing a Bluetooth keyboard while you're using a laptop as a laptop (on your lap instead of on a desk) is a tad worse

> Unless you really need to have a mobile workstation - running between meetings, conference rooms, into lots of labs/industrial environments where you can't bring a laptop cart with monitor/keyboard...why would you not dock the machine?

> Even if you prefer the feel of the keyboard or trackpad, wouldn't you want the ergonomics to be better than a laptop if you're working on it all day? A pair or trio of 20+ inch displays mounted just below eye height at about reach distance, ergonomic keyboard with elbows at about 90 degrees, and full size mouse will always be a better workstation than the nicest laptop keyboard, trackpad, and 15" display hinged to said keyboard.

On my desk(s) the laptop is usually docked and connected to external monitors and an external (and ergonomic) keyboard and mouse kit, but I happen to work from trains, planes, airports, coworkings or from the couch sometimes. I also like the ability to just close the lid and quickly move somewhere else if needed, having to use a Bluetooth keyboard for this case is awkward to say the least. At this point, why get a laptop at all?

(disclaimer: I'm 100% pro desktop PCs)

See, the above is what I’m talking about. You’re making excuses to keep yourself miserable. Just ask your employer for an external keyboard. Or get one yourself. It’s no more offensive than buying aftermarket parts for a car.

It clearly is completely acceptable for Apple to act this way, because millions of MacBook Pros are sold and most are fine with them.

Ps. Please tell me more about now external keyboards are uncomfortable. They’re how everyone not on a laptop types, and usually the main example of good keyboards. I would be willing to contribute to an external keyboard gofundme to help resolve your misery.

The topic of this article is, quite clearly, "MacBook Pro keyboards are unreliable", not "I don't like typing on MacBook Pro keyboards".

If yours is still reliable, that's great. That doesn't take away from the new keyboards being unreliable for an unusually large majority of users.

It’s not unreliability for a majority, though. That would imply over 50% of laptops have required repairs, which is a ludicrous number. There is literally no evidence of that.

A vocal minority, yes. That can’t seem to accept that it is a minority.

If you follow the rule of 1-9-90, for every outspoken person in the community, there are 90 others who are silently working around the issues with their keyboard.

And does it really matter whether it’s a minority or a majority? Perhaps I should have worded it as a “significant number of users” to avoid the hangup on one word.

It does matter if it’s a minority or a majority! Words like “completely unacceptable”, “should be illegal”, “never again” are thrown around with abandon, painting a false picture of what’s actually going on: a substantial quality issue for a minority (10-20%?) number of users, but perceived by social media participants to be a vast majority (60%+).

Misperceptions such as these lead to lots of mistaken beliefs about far reaching issues.

> because I like my Macbook Pro, have never had a keyboard issue, I LIKE TYPING on the keyboard, and would buy another one.

In general I've found that slow typers are the people saying things like this. Nobody with a history of speed at a keyboard can be satisfied with a tablet-like KB, let alone one with the gigantic palm-magnet touchpad.

When people profess their love for the butterflies, I carefully observe their typing style. Palms held high, fingers pecking like bird beaks. And always, always very slowly.

See, here we go again, more sneering. I have been using keyboards for 35 years and type 100+ wpm with my MacBook Pro.

People just can’t accept that a majority of users aren’t having problems.

A lot of people are stuck developing on macbooks if they're creating mobile apps

I used to be the guy saying that this wasn't such a big deal, not worth the fuss. Until it happened to me. I have issues with spaces (random spaces inserted here and there). It's not bad enough that I have to get my computer fixed urgently, but it is annoying. It's not what you expect from such a high-end device. I haven't taken the time to see what's Apple answer to these problems, but I do hope that this will be fixed free of charge without them keeping my computer for too long...

> I'm ditching Macs and will pick up a Microsoft Surface Book

I'm not to that point yet. I'm not an apple fanboy, and I'm not really happy about the direction Apple is taking. But I still prefer Mac OS to Linux or Windows, and I've never seen a non-apple laptop that I've found particularly attractive. And they usually have their own issues too.

Let's hope they'll fix this particular issue.

OK, so my theory on that is that it was all Jony Ive fault. Back in the days when Jobs was still around he was a natural counter balance to Ive. He wanted everything to be not only 'beautiful' but most notably just working. Ive was great source of new design ideas for him and he was usually throwing away bad ones (from technical point of view) and leaving the god ones (of course there was some mistakes but over all it was working just fine).

At some point Ive became to have major role in making decisions of what's going in to production. Jobs had serious health issues, couldn't keep his eye on everything and finally he passed away which made Jony the guy who was making decisions pretty much on his own. I bet that trashcan MacPro, butterfly keyboards, "thinness war", sticking for too long to one design etc., those are all his ideas that he pushed trough.

Quite recently Apple realized that leaving everything in Ives hands is not that good idea after all and I have a feeling that redesigned MacPro and decision to ditch butterfly keyboards from newest MBPs was forced on Ive and that's the real reason behind him becoming external contractor for Apple. They couldn't fire him completely but they needed changes and Jony didn't liked restrictions on his design choices so they've split.

As for the future, we already saw that story in the past and as we know history like to repeat itself. In the next 2-3 years Apple products will become more in line of what users wants. They finally started to listen to people and it will result with better products, at least in short term. Times has changed and I hope that history will not repeat itself in the next step when, like in the 90s, Apple will become shadow of it's former self, trying to build products based on financial statistics and polls and not on engineering and design talent of their employees. After all we think we know what we want but in reality there will be products and solutions that we can't imagine right know and no amount of polls will give the answer to a question what's next, what's behind the horizon.

I want to believe this, and as there is no evidence one way or the other, it sounds good enough that it makes me hopeful for future products.

My question is, what did Ive do that was truly great? I honestly don't know and his name is mostly brought up with respect to designs that didn't pan out. What did he do that everyone seems to respect him as an uber-designer?

I do think, for a while at least, apple's design was eye catching and cool. But for a long long time now it's been stagnant and copycatted all over the industry. So much so, that it doesn't really stand out any more. That's all fine, but it makes me wonder what Ive has been doing for the last 5-10 years, because not much has changed.

Pretty much everything what Apple made since original iMac G3 was Ive design and I think the biggest thing that he did was that original iMac G3.

The story is pretty simple, Ive became Apple employee around 92 so before Jobs big comeback. Back in those days he had soft spot for translucent plastics. This showed beautifully in his first serious design for Apple, Apple Newton eMate. When Jobs came back to Apple he was looking for cool designs and he felt in love with Ives designs and translucent plastics (Jobs was crazy on making even PCB look good and idea of showing that work to the clients was appealing to him). So that's how arguably one of the biggest tech bromances started.

So yeah iMac was the design that brought back Apple to living. Other most notable designs was iPod, iPhone, iMac G4, MB, MBP, slim iMacs, list goes on and on. The difference is that all those designs was under supervision of Jobs. So ideas like charging port on Magic Mouse wouldn't fly under Jobs supervision (and they didn't) but when Jobs passed away then suddenly those ideas went into production.

The story of how they met is from Jobs and Ives biographies, I highly recommend reading at least Jobs biography by Isaacson

Thanks for the background. Ive's wikipedia page didn't have much.

I don't think it was Ive specifically - it appears that Ive really hasn't done anything but Apple Park and collect his paycheck since the Apple Watch shipped tbh - but the lack of any one in management to push back against the rest of Ive's team in the way Jobs would have done is obvious.

I recently upgraded from a 2015 MBP to the latest 2019 MBP, and I actually think it surpasses the older model in almost every way. So far I haven't experienced any of the keyboard issues that people have been reporting, although I'm aware that this model has a membrane that was put in to prevent those issues. My only gripe is the need to have a dongle to connect HDMI and USB 2.0, but I still wouldn't go back to the 2015 over it.

On a side note, I bought a new iPhone SE to see how it compared to the iPhone XS because HN raves about the SE so much. It was pretty underwhelming and there was just absolutely no way I could justify replacing the XS with it.

I love my SE but you really need to be OK with worse battery performance than normal and a bit slower of a phone. I don't think anyone should say it's strictly better than a phone released in the last two years ... but all of these things are preference-based decisions.

I think the XS is a better phone in all aspects except for it’s fragility, no headphone jack and less-than-optimal size.

Give me an X in the same frame size as the SE and I pack my sleeping bag and make sure I’m first in the queue for the Store

We are the silent majority (I think). I'm also very happy with the new keyboard and actually came to hate the old 2015 model keyboard.

I live in a relatively dusty place/country that you can see grain dust on top of the laptop at the end of the week. I was concerned reading reports before buying the laptop. But now it's almost a year and the keyboard is fine.

My guess is:

- Some models have problems.

- Some people are not comfortable with the keyboard and thus make typing mistakes?

Does it have no cons though? Not really. The trackpad is huge and sometimes I mistakenly click with my palm. The Touchbar is sometimes useful but also slower than typing on a regular keyboard (esc/sound/luminosity).

Let me list the problems or things I don't like about my 2019 13 inch MBP:

1. Screen flickers occasionally

2. Turning on bluetooth can make the keys stuck making it impossible to type anything in order to unlock my laptop (turning off bluetooth fixes this)

3. I hate the feel of the touchbar on my fingers.

4. The touchpad is too large and I often accidentally touch it and do something I didn't want to do.

5. The mic and sound have recently gone wonky. When I'm calls, the mic automatically mutes every few minutes and a message appears saying the mic couldn't be found. A loose connection somewhere?

All this for a $2000+ laptop. Luckily it's a work laptop so I didn't pay out of pocket, but still.

I still have a 2014 15 inch MBP that I still love and use. I wish I could use it for work.

I have the same issue as you with mic and sound on my brand new macbook air. It seems restarting fixes the issue for a few hours so it might be a software issue but regardless it'a. huge problem for me...

Unfortunately my trusty 2013 mbp died so had to buy that as a replacement (I used to replace my laptop for the top of the line apple laptop every 3 years but didn't in this case due to the keyboard)

The dodgy ribbon cable connecting the top case to the screen is another ticking time bomb inside everyone's 2016+ MBPs. It's very close to the hinge and leads to an untimely death.

Switched to a thinkpad x1 carbon just over a month ago, coming from years of macbooks. I'm over the moon. The trackpad isn't as good, but all the things I use the trackpad for are easily replaced with keyboard shortcuts.

Same! I installed the Pop! OS Linux distro and everything seems fine. It doesn’t have the battery life I’d hope, but I have a terminal and 32GB memory for less than a new Macbook with less memory. The keyboard works well.

I'm clinging to my 2015 MBP until it breaks, and it scared me a few times recently. So I bought a backup x230 for ~$100 just in case, and loaded Pop!.

To be honest, I think I like Pop! better than OSX. I hadn't used linux distros before because I'm not trying to spend my time fiddling around with the OS, I want things to just work and get out of my way. Pop! does. It's got that miryokuteki hinshitsu. And the ability to use exactly the same packages as our ubuntu webservers has already helped me debug a buildpack issue.

I'll certainly consider supporting System76 when I'm next looking for a brand-new computer.

PopOS is fantastic, and if you're looking to stay in the Ubuntu domain it's by far the best version out there. But your tastes sound a lot like mine, so I'd like to throw out a recommendation for Manjaro, it's incredibly well-polished and the rolling-release is great. It'll likely run a bit faster too since it's Arch-based.

I went with an XPS13 a couple years ago. Display is great (I'd say on-par with Apple), keyboard is far superior to the new MacBooks, touchpad is about 90% compared to MacBooks, and I'm pretty sure it's thinner. For sure the smaller bezel gives it a smaller footprint.

Battery life was pretty decent after autotuning power settings through powertop, too. Better than I'm getting on my current work-issued MacBook, at least.

Only real annoyance for me was the wifi, which would vanish off the face of the earth after resuming from suspend. But I was able to replace it with a $15 Intel, a tiny screwdriver, and some patience.

I don't get what people have with apple's trackpad. I once got some second hand macbook air or something for work, and it felt like sliding my finger on a fine grained sandpaper. A jarring experience that I didn't like.

Pretty much anything else I ever used was more pleasant than that.

They are typically glass smooth, like an iPhone. Someone must have tried cleaning the one you have with some sort of abrasive or something.

I doubt it. It would look uneven or left some marks on the chasis nearby, and whatnot.

The chasis did have abrasive finish too. I'm quite sensitive to abrasive surfaces, they give me chills.

Anyway, maybe I'm misremembering and it was just the chasis. Nevertheless it was a very unpleasant computer.

Apple is replacing these keyboards for free...

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/keyboard-service-program-for...

I get that it is hugely inconvenient to go without your laptop for any amount of time - I depend on mine for work at a 2 person startup, so really I do get it! But if you are this fed up with it, then I'd say go for it.

I finally bit the bullet and found a local certified apple repair place (NOT THE APPLE STORE) that allowed me to take my laptop home with me after they ran diagnostics (10 minutes) and ordered the new keyboard.

I emphasize not the apple store because they will try to keep your laptop for the 24-48 hours it takes your replacement keyboard to ship.

The repair actually took around 3 hours, which I spent playing with my kid! Woot! The place I went through text me when the keyboard came in and then again when my laptop was ready to go - was super easy.

Because of the way the keyboard is bundled into the laptop, they have to replace the battery too - so that was an added bonus.

edit - just want to add that the replacement has had no issues ~1 month in (++spelling)

I wish I knew this before I lost my machine for 4 days last year. My replacement has mostly held up too—just a few blasts of compressed air here and there.

I am pretty sure this policy alone is keeping the lights on for this particular company. It is a serious bummer the way apple handles it through the apple stores.

Only for 4 years after the purchase. So your laptop has a life expectancy of not much more than 4 years, which is not much considering how high-priced the laptop is. My 2015 MB Pro is still going strong after 4 years. Also, not everyone is as lucky as you with the keyboard repair, sometimes people have to give away their laptop for more than a week, which is also quite unacceptable for a manufacture defect.

Why would anyone buy a 2018 MacBook? This problem has been in the news for over a year. While they plan to fix it, they haven't yet.

I had a late 2016 model with a defective keyboard out of the box. Finally had it repaired mid-2018 (which took over a month), and the new one died within days.

It'll be many years before I consider even accepting another free MacBook from work, much less buy one. I don't know if Apple realizes just how badly they messed up. I used to have an iPad, iPhone, home MacBook, and work MacBook, and even stupidly bought their overpriced Thunderbolt display out of some deranged brand loyalty. Now the only Apple product I still use is my iPad (because it hasn't completely died yet), and when this goes, that'll be it.

I have a 2017 Macbook Pro and love it, and have never had the keyboard issues. This is the thing: there are millions of happy Macbook Pro customers that don't hang out on hacker news.

I then spilled wine on my keyboard, they replaced the top case and it, still no problems.

Yes, they should fix the keyboard. But I don't think they've screwed up as badly as people think.

I think Jony was shown the door over this debacle, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Phil is next. When is the last time you’ve seen Phil on stage at an event?

He’s the one who introduced these keyboards and praised them up and down, he’s probably going to take the fall for them as well.

I have money burning a hole in my pocket right now to buy a MBP but I can’t do it. It is literally a defective product. Shame on Apple for selling a productive they know is not going to work well for their customers.

> When is the last time you’ve seen Phil on stage at an event?

The September event?

I was going to say — nearly every recent event.

This is absurd. No way their chief of design who led dozens of successful product launches is fired for a niche complaint about a niche product. It’s not like there was some malfeasance here.

Ive has certainly lost touch with what makes good design, probably he is just burnt out, but I find it very difficult to believe he was forced out.

He never wanted to live in California in the first place. I think Apple was able to squeeze a lot of extra years out of him, but he’s had his “fuck you money” for a long time, and the work is no longer engaging enough to keep him here.

He was never particularly interested in software and that’s where Apple Design needs to focus now. The AR glasses are an interesting design problem but it’s so software heavy I doubt Ive can really stay engaged with it.

The car is probably an interesting project, but I’m sure he’s been through the complete design of several cars in the last decade, and it’s not design holding that back, it’s engineering. Self driving is required to unlock the roadmap I’m sure they’ve already mapped out.

He could probably get excited about the design-for-manufacturing problem there, but it’s an ENORMOUS problem compared to iPhone. I don’t think he has the tolerance for chaos Elon has, and which you need to build a factory of that complexity.

Why would their head of WW Marketing go down for this? This would be the fault of whoever was in charge of the keyboard design and its multiple failing iterations. So presumably the head of Mac HW.

MacBook revenue is a rounding error in Apple's books.

I'm glad that others are voicing the same issues I'm experiencing. Sometimes I wonder if I'm taking crazy pills.

My solution has been to place an Apple bluetooth keyboard -on top- of my 15" MBP keyboard and that seems to work pretty well, but wow, it shouldn't have come to this...

Thankfully I get to make my own hardware decisions, so I've made a point of ordering a new MBP every time a new revision is released, and promptly returning it to Apple the next day when I realize the keyboard is still absolute rubbish.

I would like to think that maybe if some person at Apple runs a report for returns and see that "keyboard" accounts for a huge majority of returns, they may actually act with some semblance of haste.

??? People has been voicing this for years.

While it had been a common complaint before, Casey Johnson really blew the story up in 2017 https://theoutline.com/post/2402/the-new-macbook-keyboard-is...

WSJ: "Appl Still Hasn’t Fixd Its MacBook Kyboad Problm" https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...

I've been fighting my MBP15 keyboard for so long. Eventually I put a USB PC keyboard on my desk with a matching keyboard map.

Abso-fucking-lute bliss! I think my productivity has gone up literally 80%

This has been a hugely reported upon issue, so much so that Apple has a whole extended warranty and keyboard replacement program in place.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

Surprised that anyone has missed this, as it has been front-paged on HN dozens if not hundreds of time.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/keyboard-service-program-for...

And yet even in this story, there are multiple comments a la "Yawn. I can't believe this is an issue. Apple shouldn't be paying attention to niche complainers."

Because the level of vitriol is not commensurate with the problem? They'll replace the keyboards, most people don't have issues. (I know I don't, 2+ years in).

Nerd entitlement rage is monotonous. The latest models 4th gen keyboards are pretty much fine.

Couple of things though:

- they'll only replace the keyboard for up to 4 years after the purchase date

- they'll replace it with the same faulty keyboard, so there's a good chance it'll have the same fault again, only once it's put of warranty

"they'll replace it with the same faulty keyboard"

We know they've gone through several revisions that have purportedly reduced the incidents of problems, and they'll likely go through more improvements. When you get your keyboard replaced they will use the better variant.

Can't believe I haven't thought of this! I've been using an Apple BT keyboard with my MBP but never thought to stack it right on top of the butterfly keyboard. I can confirm that it fits the 13" MPB, just like your 15"!

Haven't tried that, but it really sounds it would be terrible to the wrists after prolonged use (in which case "prolonged" would mean longer than 10-15 minutes).

Update: my Apple BT keyboard (which is many years old -- it takes 3 AA batteries, not 2) slightly covers the top of the trackpad on my 13" MBP. This means that the palm rejection algorithm does not work as well. I may be able to get it to work for me by just adjusting how I hold my hands when typing, but it's not a clear home-run with my smaller laptop and possibly larger keyboard. I would seriously consider getting a smaller BT keyboard to make this work, though.

>My solution has been to place an Apple bluetooth keyboard -on top- of my 15" MBP keyboard and that seems to work pretty well, but wow, it shouldn't have come to this...

I did that with my 2008 unibody Macbook Pro (yes, Macbook keyboards also sometimes broke pre-2016), which also suffered from EM209 [1] (second time, beyond Apple's free-fix period). I used heavy-duty rubber bands to both hold the screen together along the non-visible borders, and affix the wireless keyboard over the computer's. Certainly something to never ever show anyone else, but completely functional with the exception of the inability to close up the computer. Only after failing to start one day did I replace it with the 2012 non-Retina I am typing on; come to think of it, it's now exactly as old as the 2008 when it completely died, albeit in full working order. (It did need a keyboard repair. I am hard on keyboards.)

[1] https://randyzwitch.com/broken-macbook-pro-hinge-fixed-free/

I don't know anyone who was a real TTY user who likes <ESC> on touchbar.

I don't know any EMACS user who likes <ESC> on touchbar.

If I do the join over these and anyone else I ask, I actually don't know anyone who likes <ESC> on touchbar.

I think Apple took a long standing market acceptance in the community I live in, and basically trashed it, for lipgloss.

I expect to move to a Lenovo Carbon X1, with qualms.

FWIW, most people I know remap caps lock to ESC for ergonomic reasons, so for them removing the physical escape key was a no-op. I realize that's a vanishing minority of normal people though :)

But then where do you map your Ctrl key if Capsloc is Esc?

You're describing the first step on a rather slippery slope. I started by making Caps into Esc... Now I press enter with my right palm and escape with my left thumb and people make fun of me when they see my workstation.

http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/9be130e4c9b503...

What’s the physical hardware you are running these on?

From what I remember, the blasted virtual escape key is also not flush with the top/left corner of the touchbar -- like the escape key is on ~every other keyboard in existence.

I had to use one of these machines for work recently and I hated every minute of it. Going back to my ThinkPad T430, running Debian and i3, was _such_ a relief.

> From what I remember, the blasted virtual escape key is also not flush with the top/left corner of the touchbar -- like the escape key is on ~every other keyboard in existence.

You can tap anywhere in that corner and it’ll register.

When it does register, that's true. Sometimes it doesn't though, and to add insult to injury I've had the TouchBar freeze on me several times.

I use escape all the time. It's useful for canceling a cmd-tab, and also canceling actions.

Not the parent, but I think that's their point - nobody who needs an Escape key likes having Escape on the touchbar.

I'm certainly in that camp; I hate the lack of physical feedback. I really don't get the point of the touchbar TBH. Beyond gimmick, they could have got a far better UX by having a row of programmable physical keys.

For what it is worth. Key repeats as described is a hardware problem. I had the same issue with the letter H. Either duplicates or a random H mid-whatever.

Every single macbook ive owned in the last 3 years has had some defect. Either a dead motherboard. Broken keyboard. Or both. Basically it is build like a piece of shit.

Had I any option I would get a cheaper better faster windows pc in a heartbeat. Sure it'll be 0.5lbs heavier. But by god it won't have that shitty giant touchpad that won't let me type without fucking up my wrists.

I downloaded Unshaky to help this out:

https://github.com/aahung/Unshaky

You can set custom timings per key, which is useful for particularly difficult keys.

It's good there are 3rd party solutions and OSS solutions such as this, but on principle, if you pay way over the odds for Apple hardware, you really shouldn't have these problems in the first place

Off-topic, but Ryan, your name brings me back to 2013 when I was just learning Ruby on Rails and you were snarkily answering my dumb questions on the #rubyonrails IRC channel. But seriously, thank you so much. Learned a ton from that channel, gained a career, and now I run my own software consultancy. And since no one learns Rails anymore we can make $$$!

Um, thanks? I think? ;)

My personal MBP wishlist:

* the new keyboard (2015 style or better)

* no touchbar (F keys, please)

* magsafe (with cables wrapped in something stronger than a tortilla)

* battery capacity that maxes out the FAA limit

* serious graphics (as an option)

* better screen coating that doesn’t flake off or scratch easily

* an even darker gray / charcoal color option

* finally... no fingerprint reader (they’re useful, but I’d rather have the added cost spent elsewhere and keep the surface clean - it takes me less than 3 seconds to type my 30 char password, unlike phones where this would be impossible)

———

If Apple can deliver on all the points above, I will spend $3k. If not, I’ll just continue until my 2011 and 2015 MBPs are dead and then move onto something else (some linux notebook). I’ve been waiting for 2 years to upgrade.

All great options but the company has moved on from us users who clamor for practical features it seems. I bet if I sharpen the lid of the next mbp I could shave with it at least.

Only one I disagree with is the fingerprint reader - I actually find that useful. Actually, I'd like to be able to use it more often, but MacOS makes me login with my password when it boots up, and then only let's me use the fingerprint reader for about 50% of privileged operations.

+1 they're horrible. I feel like I wasted $3k and if I could return it, I would.

I got a July 2019 MBP after having suffered from a totally unusable keyboard in a mid-2018 MBP one. In theory the July 2019 model has a 4th generation butterfly keyboard, whereas the 2018 ones were on 3rd gen - and despite using it heavily over the last month, I haven't had problems yet... apart from the backspace & O keys getting briefly sticky (presumably due to some dirt getting underneath). However, unlike on the 2018 one, holding the keyboard upside down and blowing at close range at the keys whilst toggling them managed to rapidly fix the problem.

I also haven't had any double presses yet (which were the plague of the 2018 one - the symptoms were identical to https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...). So, anecdotally, so far it seems that the 2019 edition is a marked improvement. I'm pretty sure by this point on the 2018 one I was having to go back and fix typos in almost every sentence.

I want Apple's screen and trackpad and Lenovo's keyboard, ports, and cooling.

Daily driver for work is a Thinkpad E580 and it’s by far the closest thing I’ve typed on to the vaunted 2015MBP keyboard to the point of me considering buying one for personal use and throwing Linux on it.

Plus it has a numpad!

Especially the trackpad and its gestures. I have a surface book at work and the trackpad is just dreadful compared to MacBook. Everything else is pretty ok

I switched when the surface book 1 came out (now on a surface book 2) but man I still miss the customizable trackpad gestures I had on my macbook pro. I don't recall the program I used but it allowed for gestures like three fingers with the index tapping to move to the next chrome tab to the left etc. I have been trying for years to replicate that in windows :(

Was it BetterTouchTool?

That made the TouchBar less annoying on my 2019 MBP

is there any PC that matches or comes close even to apple's trackpad?

I haven’t seen anything even close.

I tried the most recent MacBook Pro keyboard over a weekend in September. Absolutely terrible experience, not to mention the Touch Bar. I hope my 2015 MBPro doesn't die on my before Apple fixes this.

I had an interview where they sat one of these things in front of me and had me write some code. Had never used one before that. I probably looked like a total idiot to them. I did not get an offer.

So he's writing today about last year's keyboard, when the laptops introduced a few months ago have a different keyboard already?

I mean, good for him, but his complaint is literally a duplicate of what other people said about the butterfly keyboards for a couple years. I'm not aware yet of these complaints continuing to apply with the newest rev.

Obviously Apple fucked up on these, and obviously they're trying to fix it / make it right, but this particular post seems, well, uninteresting and unworthy of HN.

So basically "buy the newer hardware and shut up"?

My point is that

(a) he's on very, very well trod ground, and

(b) Apple has already taken steps to correct the problem he's yelling about.

So what's the point of his post?

I’m late to the party, but I’ve personally had my keyboard replaced at least 3 times, the logic board replaced 2x, the display replaced 1x, and the entire unit replaced entirely (all under warranty, albeit AppleCare+).

To say that I regret selling my “tortoise” of a 2015 MBP is an understatement.

Wow, running a MacBook Air from 2013 here and just replaced the battery myself recently. It's like new now.

It's funny, I resisted an upgrade until my 2015 MBP became unusable, in part because I dreaded the keyboard. I do miss physical function keys, but I actually like the more clacky & tactile butterfly keys.

Maybe I'll feel differently once I finally manage to work a crumb underneath one of them.

Yeah, the feel of the butterfly mechanism is subjectively excellent. I can type faster on it than even my mech keyboard at home, which is a very impressive feat. But my MacBook is going in for its second keyboard repair in a year soon, so...

They're apparently ditching the butterfly keyboard in the next redesign. Bittersweet as someone who loves the keyfeel, but I guess it's for the best so here's hoping.

The new scissor design is said to feel more like the butterfly but with more travel rather than reverting to the old scissor design, if that makes you feel any better.

It does :)

I also enjoy the keyboard! I miss the clickiness when I use other keyboards.

I would be much happier without the touch bar, though.

My experience has been similar. I upgraded from the 2014 MBP (which is a glorious machine) to 2018. The day I got it, I realized it had issues with the keyboard (several keys repeating). Took it back to the store, got a new device. The issue wasn't as widely acknowledged back then. When I complained to the store that I was experiencing the same issue again, the gave me yet another device, same issue. Went back to the store and they got annoyed at me. They complained that none of their other customers reported this issue.

They accused me of installing apps that were causing this issue although I had nothing of that sort installed. I am a web developer and like to think that I know computers well enough to not install sketchy apps. I had installed all the same apps that were in my 2014 MBP so when I confronted the store, they just gave me a random reason and sent me away. I got so fed up trying to convince these people that there was an issue. I ended up buying a Magic Keyboard and using that instead.

Mind you, all this happened in India where Apple doesn't have a direct retail experience. 3rd party retailers have zero training procedures in place. Their staff isn't nearly as knowledgeable as their US counterparts about the products they are selling. This whole keyboard fiasco has been my worst Apple experience.

I wonder how much time Jony Ive personally spends typing. I'm betting it is a very small amount.

The man probably doesn't even own a macbook other than to look at it sitting pretty on a shelf. Steve would have thrown a mbp out of a window if it doubled a key on him. Wouldn't be surprised if Ive is an ipad + pencil only loonie. Certainly would explain a lot.

I sometimes wonder if bringing Scott Forestall back in would fix things, even temporarily. He wasn’t necessarily pleasant but then again, neither was Steve.

My hands hurt when typing on this keyboard. I've never had this problem with a Mac laptop in the better part of two decades.

Same! I have legitimate joint pain in my index and middle fingers because of this thing. Have to use an external keyboard now for anything but a few minutes.

It's so bad!

I also have persistent joint pain in my fingers when I use my 2017 MBP keyboard even a moderate amount. I switched to an Apple BT keyboard and about a month later the pain subsided.

I know this topic has been done to death on HN, but this remains a persistent concern.

I've had two keyboard replacements. If you haven't had it done, it's a "topcase" replacement - which involved a good half of the machine. It's a big change and I was told to allow for 5 business days as well.

My Macbook Pro is out of the 4 year replacement window - and the Spacebar is starting to fail.

I've owned every form-factor of the Macbook Pro - won't be next time round.

> My Macbook Pro is out of the 4 year replacement window - and the Spacebar is starting to fail.

If you're out of the 4-year replacement window, then your MBP must not be a 2016 or newer model.

My mistake - I meant to say "coming out of". I got the very first of the 2016 (and the touchbar) models.

I went to Staples (store chain here in Canada) to play with the new butterfly keyboard shortly after it first came out in the MBP years ago, and the MBP they had on display had a non-functional Enter key (it would register once every 2-4 clicks). What is really shocking to me, however, is that it took so long for them to announce they were ditching their flawed design. This delay is a good reflection of the Apple brand mindset at work...

My boss has one of those. She usually goes back and fixes her mistakes, but when she gets stressed and in a hurry she gives up on the corrections.

We just pretend that she's drunk in these cases. Or that this is just how the cool kids (with the expensive gadgets) talk these days. Or that the stress of the job has uncovered a long lost speech impediment.

Overall, I think the keyboard has been a really positive thing for team cohesion.

Mis-types, reliability, etc. aside, I just don't like the keyboard. Normal chiclets are bad enough, but the mac is worse. Essentially zero travel, and I find my self bottoming out each stroke and typing what is evidently much too hard. I got used to chiclets okay (though I still use a full mechanical when I can), but the mac keyboard is too much. I feel like I'm typing on a touch-screen, or worse, that I'm some how playing with a toy (rather than a machine built to do work).

I guess a lot of Apple's products give me that feeling these days. Ios 7 design probably didn't help much. Maybe with Jony Ive gone, it will get better? I like things that feel solid. These days, macs just don't. I probably shouldn't beat on just apple here, though; it seems to be a broader trend for the worse.

Have been using Macs since 2004. I like the new MBPs in every other aspect except: the touch strip and the keyboard.

Since I use an external monitor, I don't use the MBPr keyboard, but an external Magic keyboard (Apple) which is excellent (even prefer it to several mechanical ones I have).

But the MBPr keyboard is crap by any measure...

Hopefully there are some rumors that the 2019 MBPr 16" model will change it. There's also a new patent about a different mechanism (with light based actuators) that looks nice if the feel is good.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/08/27/apple-may-not-use...

Funny. My boss, who has a Lenovo X1 Carbon, was just telling me how envious he was of the far superior keyboard on his wife's brand new Apple laptop.

I have a brand-new Macbook Pro. I actually love the keyboard.

Whatt are you talking about? My keyboaord works jst fine.

> For the most part, it sits on one of two desks that I use or it sits on my lap on the train.

If this is the case, do yourself a favor and go and buy two ergonomic screens, keyboards and mice - one for each location.

It'll save you becoming a hunched over laptop gremlin.

I already have a mechanical keyboard for one of the two desks, and in the new year I'll only have _one_ desk, so I'll move that keyboard over to there. I don't mind the trackpad, but I've considered getting one of those vertical mice.

I think using an external keyboard should just be a general assumption for laptop usage. The built ins are terrible due to the misaligned priorities of manufacturers both in terms of key depth and wear resistance. I type strong, maybe even stronk, so keyboards have a definite lifetime to them.

Do you use an external monitor? That's the most important part of the setup, IMO.

I said two monitors but what I mean is one for each location - many people I know seem to prefer two but I think it's an antipattern (move your head, instead of alt+tab or similar)

My tip, which seems to be working for me so far: I upgraded from a 2015 to a 2018 a few months ago, and _immediately_ added a silicone keyboard cover that I got on Amazon for $8 or so.

It's really thin and doesn't bother me, but the key thing is that it keeps everything out of the keyboard. So far, my keys continue to all work just fine. It could be luck, but it could also be that no dust or anything is getting trapped in the butterfly switches.

I will give the disclaimer that much of the time I'm typing on a bluetooth keyboard, but I still get quite a bit of use out of the built-in keyboard as well.

I'm surprised people are still buying MBPs.

When the 2016 models were announced I bought a 2015 model. It had a great keyboard but I sold it because the 4th gen CPU ran too hot in my tropical climate and it was rather bulky.

I moved to a 5K iMac instead. Best computer I've ever owned. I still use an old 2014 13'' MBP on the rare occasions I'm not working from home, or when I'm on the couch (like right now).

Apple are not idiots and they will fix this at some point, but the Mac is about 10% of their revenue so they are in no hurry.

This is the sole reason I recently upgraded to a souped up 2015 MBP: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B07WCCW4GS/R50D0AGJ5M872

I expect this to last me a decent handful of years; if Apple hasn't gotten their shit together by then, no matter how much I otherwise like their hardware, I'll have no choice but to pick something else and switch back to Linux.

"Not currently available" on the product listing.

That particular one seems to go in and out of stock frequently (there are a bunch of others), but what I paid was $680.

I've been a huge fan of Apple hardware but I can't take it any longer. I've switched to Windows for a few months and it has really improved. WSL2 is pretty awesome!

Hey, HN can we stop with all those articles on how bad the MacBook keyboard is or why do you leave Medium for X (insert X as your new platform).

There are now 100 versions of this story and we know already how bad the product it is.

I believe that if you're going to buy a new MacBook Pro, then you are going to meet the same problem again and again. Sometimes Apple users are masochists in this way: keeping buying products from the same OEM like a religion.

Change manufacturer and see if it goes better.

I'll upvote every one of these stories. I have a macbook pro and use external keyboard 95% of the time. But the built in one (and touchbar) is awful. Maybe someone at Apple will read hacker news someday and realize it.

Or not and I'll just keep using this piece of crap. C'est la vie

-- it's amazing how these little details matter because they're right there affecting your quality of life every minute of every day and everyone is telling you to grin and bear it

I just got an old one (2015) out of the closet at work when they offered me the new one.

Completely agree here. Apple sacrificed the user experience in pursuit of thinness of the laptop. I just got my first Windows laptop in years because I didn't want to put up with the keyboard, touchbar, etc.

Windows also now includes a Linux subsystem that works great as far as I can tell (though I'm by no means a power user), so I don't feel as though I've sacrificed anything.

I just started in a new role a few months ago and was given a new MBP. I used an older one in my last role and loved it, but the new ones I simply can't stand. For starters the keyboards feel cheap, I needed 2 - 3 dongles just to plug in all my external monitors, keyboard and mouse. I gave up on the apple mouse since when it dies it's belly up due to where the charging cable is, that's simply poor design.

I was also always swapping out dongles for my monitors as it was 50/50 if the monitor would come back online.

I could go on and on, but the short of it is I went to our IT team and told them I wanted a Win10 machine. I was the first person, hopefully not the last, to turn in an Apple laptop for a windows, I became an instant legend.

TBH, I don't miss it at all. I've got WSL and can do everything I did on that MBP on this ThinkPad. It's nice to have plenty of ports without ugly dongles and a proper docking station.

IMO, Apple's lost it since Job's passing.

2015 MBP is the best MBP out there.

I bought it when the new 2016 model came out. Glad that I didn't stick with the new trend. Definitely a fad.

Apple seems to be in a bit of a lull lately. None of their phones have really impressed. Stuff like this. And then airpod 2 being airpod 1 with a promise of contains more magic inside that you can't see. And the 1000 dollar stand?

Their recent focus on additional privacy is welcome but not much use if the gear is underwhelming and overpriced.

The Macbook Pro display drives me crazy. It takes just a small squeeze for the liquid-crystal particles to dislodge themselves and form an orange blob that moves around with gravity, leaving blue splotches where they used to be .. and yet Apple refuse to acknowledge this is a design problem, and pushes it back to the customer as "user fault: didn't use a case".

I'm just waiting for enough people to have this happen to them, complain about it, and it becomes a class action situation .. like so many other failures of Apple quality management in the last decade. The last time this happened, Apple ended up replacing my whole system - because they'd misapplied thermal paste to their CPU's, on top of using poor quality GPU's from Nvidia ..

At some point, this is going to be a problem for Apple. At a Trillion-dollar market cap, I wonder how soon, however ..

I have a 2019 MBP and love everything except the keyboard. It's literally the only thing that holds it back from being the best laptop on the market in my opinion. Whatever sauce Apple puts into optimization and stability seriously pays off, because even with the garbage keyboard I still dropped $1300 for it.

I got a mid-2015 MacBook Pro 15" because of the keyboard problems. The screen is beautiful and the processor is fast enough for Java development using IntelliJ.

Too bad I can't take this laptop with me when I'm flying because it's on the no-fly list.

My options for Apple laptops are pretty much zero right now.

Doesn't Apple fix the no-fly problem for free, since the only ones affected by the no-fly are the recalled ones (any recalled lithium ion battery is no-fly)?

Sure it takes time to fix and the problem really shouldn't have happened in the first place, but if your machine is at risk of having the battery overheat or catch fire, it feels like the fact you can't fly with it ought to be the least of your worries.

My mid-2015 MacBook Pro was manufactured outside the recall window (July 2017). It is not a dangerous device. But I doubt I can convince the TSA officer that, and my options will probably be to either hand over the MacBook Pro or not fly at all.

I have the first generation TouchBar MacBook Pro. And I've gotten the bottom part replaced twice: once because I spilled coffee on my desk and my MacBook decided to drink it, and the second time because they didn't attach the bottom plate properly (they forgot 2 screws and 1 other just fell out).

The keyboard they replaced it with is significantly better. It feels softer to the touch, and it's quieter. The keys don't get stuck anymore and it generally feels like a proper nice keyboard.

That said. I rarely use the laptop in an opened-up state anyway. I tend to connect it to a screen + keyboard + mouse and enjoy the computer without that idiotic TouchBar.

Last I checked you can send your MBP back to Apple and they'll replace the faulty keyboard. I did it during a vacation, it only took them 1 week to send the fixed system back.

So I've been reading HN for almost 10 years now and nothing frustrated me this much to post a comment. 2017 MB Pro keyboard is a damn nightmare.

By introducing Apple keyboard service program for MBPro2017 they acknowledged the keyboard is broken by design. I happened to spill a little bit of coffee on it, but MB did no care, it was working fine, up until the point I started losing keys because of the weak micro hinges they have on the keys and flawed design.

Apple said they cannot fix it because of the coffee drops they found, even though it's flawed by design. I paid 3000USD for a laptop with 2 USBC ports and a freakin useless keyboard. That's the reason I didn't buy an iPhone now, and won't be buying any new Apple hardware no more - EVER. One more out of the apple train.

Almost ironic. You have arguably the best case, best display, best OS: however it is the plastic keyboard...

I am currently scheduling an appointment with my MacBook Air 2018 (Apple keyboard exchange program). It takes - as the Apple shop yesterday stated - 3 to 12 days to exchange the keyboard. 3 to 12 days!

I made the jump to a Thinkpad T series and Ubuntu. The keyboards are better than them current macs but not what i remember from the 90s with IB Thinkpads. Or go Dell XPS.

We have 3 Macbook Pros and all of them have keyboard issues. Command key and space keys are few times not working. Often time other keys not registering or double entry sometimes. My few keys like A faded off (color came out). Earlier I had MBA which also has key fading issues.

My biggest gripe is that the up and down arrow keys are half the size of the left and right arrow keys. It makes it difficult to quickly move the cursor or scroll through previous commands in a terminal. If I didn’t use emacs I probably would have picked another machine

Hear, hear! I used a 2018 MacBook for a little over a year; my work laptop is now a ThinkPad running Linux. My personal laptop is a 2015 MacBook. When it dies, I will not replace it with a butterfly-switch laptop.

(I also miss USB type A and MagSafe, but the keyboard was the deal breaker.)

I'd like to plug my preferred solution to the crappy new keyboards - get the Anne Pro 2, a compact mechanical keyboard that speaks Bluetooth or USB-C. It nearly the same footprint as the built-in keyboard (ergo doesn't take up much desk space), and is a delightful typing experience.

It takes a bit of getting used to, lacking function and arrow keys, but after a week or two I wouldn't trade it at all. It's a perfect match for how I use my laptop, which is 90% of the time at my desk.

Non-affiliate link: https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Mechanical-Gaming-Keyboard-Backl...

The worst part is that you end up breaking your fingers when you want to angry type a rant about the keyboard. :)

I picked up a bluetooth mechanical keyboard that I just carry around with me and don't use the laptop's actual keyboard at all.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) user here. I love this MacBook. It's the best laptop I have ever owned. My girlfriend has a recent MacBook Pro and it's just worse. The keyboard sucks, it's thin but feels metalic/heavy. It also gets super warm with a bit of CPU usage. And her personal MacBook from 2017 is also worse, the keyboard doesn't work properly a lot of the times and you cannot clean it. Keys have been stuck multiple times.

The 2015 MacBook Pro is just superior and I am very hesitant to buy a new one. I just want this model with better specs.

He’s completely right, i’ve made the same upgrade from 2015 (rip) and it’s super frustrating. The tab keys not working is the worse for me . I continue to put random letters in random files when using it. Is a nightmare.

Everyone’s different but: I’ve had a 2016 MacBook, 2018 MBP and 2019 MacBook Air. Typing performance was for me excellent on all three (wrote a ton of code so heavy keyboard use).

However the 2016 keyboard did have a failing space bar replaced twice and would have had a third (and a lemon law claim) had it not suffered an immersion first. Both times I was without my computer for 24 hours. The 2018 and 2019 experiences have been great.

So while I’m not thrilled on the reliability front I can’t say I’m too upset. And key travel was not an issue for me.

Just got the Macbook Air 2018 16GB/512GB from BestBuy for $1,150. Cheapest I've seen even by a eBay second hand standard. I think the price is good enough for me to overlook the keyboard reliability risk... typing is a bit loud though. I bought a Macbook Air 2019 and returned it before, typing on that keyboard was a bit quieter.

Overall, keyboard doesn't bother me that much after a couple of hours. I can type pretty fast in this thing. i5 duo core isn't that bad, either. I can multi-task quite well. So far I have zero regret.

My wife recently bought a macbook pro and I hate the keyboard (her comment was "you get used to it"). My 2015 MBP is running real slow and I didn't want to wait for next year's refreshed keyboard so I just ordered an oryx pro with ridiculous specs for less than I would have spent on a MBP (although probably the screen is worse and definitely the battery too - we'll see about the rest of the hardware). Really curious to see how it will feel to back to linux.

Yup every time I use my older personal laptop at home, I'm reminded by how much shittier the new keyboards are. They sound terrible and I never end up hitting the correct arrow key.

It's absurd that someone thinks they can buy a BRAND of keyboard and expect it to meet what they want their typing to be. There is a HUGE range of UX factors involved with keyboards - ask anyone who's custom soldered up Cherry MX boards to get what is "just right" for them. There are factors like travel distance, and "clickyness" to consider, not to mention contour of keycaps.

But then ask yourself why Apple doesn't offer different keyboard styles based on typing style.

I've got a laundry list of recent MacBook Pro issues:

1) Batteries have been swelling like pillows since 2010, affecting 2 of 3 of my MBPs. They said it's an anomaly, but the recent exploding batteries didn't surprise me at all since many people experience this swelling.

2) Double-pressing keys for 2018 MBP, as in this article

3) Keys fading quickly on 2018 MBP, killing the resale value of the laptops instantly. Good for Apple though, both me and others who would have bought my laptop have to go buy new ones

I have a 2016 MB Pro and the keyboard had serious issues which were also reported by Apple for recall: https://support.apple.com/keyboard-service-program-for-mac-n... It resulted in two of my keys to completely BREAK and here Apple is now not willing to replace the keyboard. Sticky != Broken. That sucks so hard.

Finally a new and refreshing take on the MacBook keyboards.

I'm currently looking to buy a new laptop to replace my old MacBook Pro, and a lot of people claim that the departure of Jon Ive might make the upcoming 16" MacBook Pro better than the older Macs.

I'm mostly drawn to Thinkpad, though. They receive unending praise for their excellent keyboards. The only downside is that they don't seem to have a model that matches my exact needs (like a 17" screen but to GPU).

I'm stuck with a $4000 brick I cannot use without frustration. Given that I'm still paying it off, this really hurts motivation.

Another issue that seems to be overlooked is the overly big force touchpad that, in combination with the awful keyboard, will not correctly reject my palms while I type, causing the cursor to move elsewhere, oftentimes causing unintended button clicks, premature email sends, page transitions, etc.

I feel you. I have the 15" mb pro at work and the only place I can use it is at my desk (with external trackpad+keyboard). The massive touchpad is driving me crazy to a point I don't want to even carry the damn thing around.

I recently upgraded and I like using the new keyboard.

The fragility of the thing cannot be defended, but the typing experience is quite good. It is very tactile: when it clicks it register. There’s no slowly pushing the key and then getting strokes registered before any tactile feedback, unlike mechanical keyboards. It’s low profile so you can rest your palms without excessively bending you wrists, which is better for your hands.

I like the new keyboard, like, a lot. I have a work 2018 and my personal 2016 and prefer the new thin keyboard and hate typing on the fat one... but my work laptop didn't survive my second trip to a dusty environment. The new keyboard is literally a toy for air conditioned daily cleaned offices, I bet Apple even has to replace their own engineers laptops when they travel to warehouses or dusty shops so they may know better than us about this issue.

I have faith they will fix it, but the current thing made the Mac, which was already a finicky flimsy thing, almost impossible to use for extended periods of time on a dusty shop floor.

I have 2 Macbook Pros. One model 2017, and another late 2018 which I barely use. the 2017 keyboard feels more and more jammed, specially the space bar. The other just because has almost 0 use I can feel isn't that jammed. In the end I will start going back to a mechanical keyboard again. I'm thinking a $300 Topre. I managed to destroy all Apple Keyboards in less than a year, yeah.

I feel like the keyboard issue is the prime example of why companies shouldn't have monopolies on who runs their OS. Sure on the one hand, they control everything and when things work, they Just Work (TM). On the other hand, they control everything and will inevitably screw something up. Your option? Deal with it, or change laptops. Oh, and change OSes too, since that was your only option for macOS.

The worst part of the keyboard is the touchbar. I'd say well over 50% of my attempts to adjust sound level fail due to triggering other functions. I've been using this thing for over a year, and I hate it more every day. I don't even have the option of getting a normal keyboard if I want the fastest mac. It is as though they did no user testing at all.

Good timing for you to switch, assuming you can hold out a little longer. The next Microsoft hardware event is in October [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/27/20834766/microsoft-surfac...

In the past year, my mac has been repaired twice, one is for the keyboard problem, the other is for the touch bar problem. So the top case has been changed twice. Now, there are some problems with the monitor. WTF!!! Every time to repair it, I have to wait for a week. I have brought a monitor now. I will repair the monitor until I have some replacement for the mac.

I have never had a MacBook before and due to changing jobs recently, I'm forced to use one now.

Its good, I also like the keyboard. The click sound is awesome and I like the thinness of the keys! Maybe I'm different, or maybe complainers are just very loud.

Personally, I still bought a Surface Laptop though, but I don't understand all the complaining and ranting about the MBP keyboard.

Even if you like the keyboard there are some unavoidable reliability issues in the long run that people face with the jamming

I just bought a dell xps 15 9570 for this reason. Looking into figuring out how to put Ubuntu on it. I'm not sure I like WSL.

I'm sorry for Apple there was a time I'd laugh at people reading what I just wrote for myself. For all the bugginess that Windows OS is the hardware of these PC laptops have caught up. I can't justify it anymore if I can't type on the ting.

Change the RAID settings in BIOS to ACPI and Ubuntu will work out of the box on Dell XPS.

WSL2 (beta now, out Q1 2020) will be a straight up linux kernel. It might better suit your needs, if you want to try it now MS has free ISO for testing you can run in a VM and toss when done.. .

Being incentivised to continue on with my 2012 retina MacBook Pro has a nice side effect of getting me used to reducing my personal wastefulness. I don't think I'm missing out on much. An i7, SSD and enough RAM. It's not new, but it is snappy.

I wonder how long I will be able to continue without needless waste, just replacing the battery and clearing out the fans.

I agree that the keyboard is terrible, but I think it's weird how many people just suffer through it and don't do anything about it. I put an external keyboard on top of the built in one (with a custom made plastic plate to block the keys of the built in from getting pressed). I am stuck with the laptop but I'm not going to be stuck with a bad keyboard.

Any cupertino locals hereplease start making appearances in coffee shops with a big fat ugly external keyboard duct taped on top of their macbook.

A friend once told me where Tim Cook goes for coffee in the AM. I'm tempted to set up shop inside with a big honking keyboard balanced on top of my MBP.

I am still waiting on Apple to fix my broken Macbook 2018 keyboard for six month, even though I got apple care. They told me they would call me so I can bring the macbook in. This is the worst customer experience I've had in years. In addition to that, they told me that they won't fix the issue. Instead they'll just clean it.

Unshaky will fix the duplicated keypress problem.

The Touch Bar really annoys me too. Not that having some sort of status display is bad, but replacing actual useful keys with ones that give you no haptic feedback on key presses, is really terrible design. When I shop computers for colleagues I usually buy 2015 Macbooks to save them from the terrible experience that it is to use a newer one.

As a curiosity, folks with consistently breaking keyboards on newer macbooks: Do you eat at or while using your laptop?

Outside of reliability issues I much prefer the new keyboard. Typing on the older one feels like typing on mush now.

I agree, when comparing it to the 2015 keyboard, it’s like typing on a squishy jello blanket.

However, my ideal keyboard is the current external Magic Keyboard that Apple sells separately. It’s a little expensive, but I love the feel of those keys, and they have just enough play in them that they feel more natural.

How many times do we have to go over this?

Agreed- a replica of this thread seems to be produced on a weekly basis on HN.

Until it's fixed. The beatings will continue until morale improves. My hope is apple engineers cringe at every one of these threads (or share in the solidarity)

For the reasons stated in this article as well as the existence of the touch bar, I have bought a ThinkPad when I wanted to upgrade my aging macbook last year.

In hindsight, I am happy with the decision thus far because I can accurately and swiftly type on my laptop keyboard without hurting my finger.

I don't understand Apple users. They continue putting out crappy products and their users act like they've been personally hurt and there's nothing they can do about it.

There is something you can do about it: buy someone else's computer. How long has it been since you used anything else?

I wonder how many people like me are staying on their MBP from <2014 til this design issue is resolved?

I love the keyboard on new Macbooks. I wish I had a keyboard like that for my desktop PC. The Apple Wired keyboard is nice but doesn't come close. I can't go back to 2015 Macbooks anymore because of how awkward their keyboards feel to me now in comparison.

Unpopular opinion: I want a touch keyboard with incredible haptic feedback. Long-throw keys trigger my particular RSI symptoms the worst. If I could move my fingers even less and apply even less force than I need to on the butterfly keyboard, I would be ecstatic.

You would benefit more from actual feedback that lets you know when you've actuated the press before bottoming out (which causes you to apply excessive force). It's not usually the travel distance that hurts you.

> This keyboard would be, by far, the part of the MacBook Pro that is used the most by everybody who owns one, and it is so poorly engineered for the pursuit of thinness.

I think this is a clear case of over engineering, not just "poor" engineering.

I've got a 2019. I've hardly used the keyboard, I keep it closed and try and make sure I can work from somewhere with an external monitor and keyboard.

There's so much negative talk about them, I'm expecting it to have dissolved by the time I open it.

I'm so glad to hear that someone else is dealing with this and that I'm not crazy. Also, the new magic keyboard isn't much better.

I think, for me, it's that both have home keys that you can barely feel, so you never know where you are on the keyboard.

I love everything about my hexacore 32gb MacBook Pro... except the keyboard. In fact I rarely use my MacBook now because the keyboard is so infuriatingly bad. I have a 2014 model that I let my kids use and it’s vastly better to type on.

> A company with more money in the bank than several countries combined.

That's one problem with big companies: they start to behave like countries, with their indifferent governments. At that point even media attention will not help.

Just as a data point, I really like the keyboard on my MacBook Air 2019. I prefer it to the 2015 MacBook Pro chicklet keyboard. No reliability issues so far. We'll see if the latest gen is an improvement in that respect.

So happy with my Dell XPS, don't understand why anyone would buy an MBP anymore.

To run MacOS?

iOS development. Photoshop. All the stuff that won’t run on Linux.

Semi off-topic, but I do see ThinkPads mentioned here.

I want to ditch the Macbook Air 2019 and move away from Apple. I hear Thinkpads mentioned a LOT, but when I research them online, I see talks about poor battery life, poor QA, etc.

Any insight?

I have a 2017 MBP w/o touchbar - I think it's pretty good. I do use a film to put over the keyboard though, maybe that's why I've been lucky (it makes the keyboard even quieter).

I put an atreus keyboard on top of my laptop keyboard a lot of the time. You can even set up your MacBook to turn off the internal keyboard automatically when certain devices are plugged in with Karabiner

I've developed extremely painful RSI since getting this awful laptop and can't even start work in the morning until the diclofenac and pain killers have kicked in. Possibly related.

Maybe you shouldn't be typing on laptop keyboards at all if you're getting RSI. Get an ergo keyboard. Your hands are worth it.

I use a MacBook Pro and a Air 2019, because I dislike the touchbar. I really like the keyboard feeling (especially the Air one) and reading these posts I wonder if someday it’s going to break.

Oh it will. I thought the keyboard was okay at first. But my spacebar key gave in within 4 months. Apple took two full weeks to fix it. They made no promises that it won't happen again.

This man echoes my feelings in such a better way that I could ever write.

Thank you! I write as a side-hustle so I'm glad to get this sort of feedback as it helps me know when I'm doing the right thing.

My refurbished 2015 Macbook Air ($500) works just fine. Updated to Mojave. Even got Picasa to run on it (have to click an error message five times, but then runs fine).

Not to mention the arrow keys produce a lot of errors and the touch to click fails to register about 10% of the time. I end up typing in the wrong window multiple times per day.

The butterfly keyboard issues are well-publicized, what did he think he was doing?

The only thing that surprises me is there hasn't been a class-action lawsuit yet.

Not sure how this adds to the gazillion complaints already out there. Just trade it in for a replacement. Takes a few days max.

The thinness issue applies to most Apple products. Who is asking for thinner phones? I want fatter phones with bigger batteries.

iPhones have been getting thicker with every generation since the iPhone 6.

So much for developer friendly computers. Why not return it as defective at that point?

Preach. After 30+ years of using Macs I switched to Windows after being swindled out of about $10,000 in MacBooks putatively covered by AppleCare at $300 per device yet mysteriously somehow not eligible for coverage. Apple, you labored long and hard over 2 generations of laptop stinkage to drive me away, but you finally succeeded. Congratulations.

Not to mention the finger joint pain.

Yes, really.

This thing is a joke.

Anyone who makes serious money with his notebook moved away from Apple years ago. I can't take people serious buying Macbooks in 2019 posting a rant about, oh surprise, the broken keyboard. This is a well known fact and if you don't develop for iOS there is no single reason or lock-in forcing you to use Macs.

Buy a Thinkpad and install Hackintosh.

I was so done with both the MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards that I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T480s. Installed Hackintosh, running the latest macOS Mojave 10.14.5 without issues (only drawback is that the Touchpad on the MacBooks are better).

Finally I can type again.

This is the reason I have not replaced my mid 2012 MBP

One of the first things I attach to every single laptop is an external keyboard. Guess why.

I never have a backpack that would be too small for one of those. (I don't carry my Model M around, of course.)

"Just avoid holding it in that way"

Zero idea what everyone’s complaining about. I’ve had the new one for five months.

Never even had a second thought about the keyboard and I code for real, as in, I get paid for it.

A real coder. Heh guys we have a real coder here. He gets paid and everything!

Not a factor. I also know people that don't have a problem with the MBP keyboard, I also know many colleagues who are driven to distraction daily (myself included).

As in I spend a long time on the computer too. Literally depend on it for my livelihood.

And so do millions of people so,how come my mass produced keyboard works just fine? Am I too insensitive or what? Something wrong with me?

I guess I can’t understand how anyone could be driven to distraction. If it’s that bad, it’s time for Aderall, not a blog post.

Does that make me not a real coder? ;)

It’s a lot like how we’re all supposedly all switching to Thinkpads or like how the end user is supposedly pissed off at Javascript

Yet another considered harmful

The keyboard issues are inevitable with this design unless you work in a literal clean room. Check back in a year.

My desk is messier than you would believe. I’m not proud. As in, only reason I’m cleaning the house today is because they’re gonna start showing it tomorrow.

I cannot see any problem with my keyboard. Yet, everyone condescends like I’m stupid.

Same old HN

Just gonna leave this here:

https://youtu.be/zh264YV5Ci8?t=338

> If Apple releases their new Macs with an identical keyboard, then I'm ditching Macs and will pick up a Microsoft Surface Book or something similar.

Holy shit, I know you're desperate but for the sake of your sanity DO NOT buy anything from the Microsoft Surface line.

I traded my Surface Book for a Dell XPS a couple of months back and, although the Dell is far from perfect, in day to day use it's about 10000x better than the Surface. Key point: it's a tool I can rely on.

Here are some examples of Surface issues that make it a very poor choice of tool as a "daily driver" machine:

- The keyboard is crap: differently crap to the Macbook Pro, but still crap (to be fair this isn't the XPS's best feature either, but it's still better), and I found myself having to correct an unusually large quantity of typos. Layout's a bit weird as well, although you do get used to that.

- The WiFi sucks: it just drops connectivity all the damn time, or refuses to reconnect, or doesn't recognise a network, or whatever. It gets boring. Yes, I've updated the firmware. Yes, I've updated the drivers.

- The battery drains fast whilst the computer is asleep. Like between 12 and 16 hours fast. This means if you don't have a full charge at the end of the day, and you forget to plug it in overnight, it's dead in the morning. My Macbook Pros can sleep for days and wake up; likewise the XPS - no problems with sleep.

- Sometimes, even when plugged in, it wouldn't charge - no idea why. Sometimes it would charge only one of the batteries (e.g., the one in the keyboard but not the one in the screen, or vice versa) - again, no idea why. Generally required a reboot to fix the latter. I got so tired of this machine letting me down because the battery was dead (for whatever reason).

- Battery life is nowhere near advertised levels. I forget what it's supposed to be: 11 hours, 13 hours, 16 hours? It doesn't matter. If you're doing any kind of serious work you'll be luck to get 3 - 4.

- Related to the above, the fans are always running and the thing runs really hot even in cool or temperate environments.

- Dumb power supply design with too-short cables (yes, you can buy generic replacements that are longer) and a fragile connector to the machine itself.

(If the above sounds really angry it's because that computer made me really angry on a regular basis. Without doubt the worst and least reliable machine I have ever owned, with the exception of two Sinclair Spectrums back in the 1980s. Do not buy one unless you're into more creative methods of self-flagellation.)

If I had to pick a machine now because, like you, I'm not going to buy another MBP[1] unless this keyboard fiasco is sorted out, it would probably be a mid-level to high end Lenovo. They seem pretty decent and offer plenty of options for customisation, depending on which range you pick.

[1] I'm still using a 2015 model, which is doing mostly fine, although one day it will need replacing.

im typing this on a 2012 macbook and have no desire to trade up LOL

Am I the only one who spends most of their time on an external keyboard?

A thread for old men.......

I've had a bunch of these (at least 4 on various work/personal machines IIRC) and I've had no usability issues. I believe in the failures people have reported, but is this guy just saying he can't type properly on these keyboards? Because that sounds like a problem on his end.

edit: I do hate the touchbar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com