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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.

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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.

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.

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 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).

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.

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.

>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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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