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Comment by chinhodado | Hacker News Reader

> Featuring a new Magic Keyboard with a redesigned scissor mechanism and 1mm travel for a more satisfying key feel, the 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers the best typing experience ever in a Mac notebook.

Feels like they claim "best typing experience" every time they release a new laptop.

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Yeah... at this point I half expect to read from Apple:

“When we changed the key travel from 1.0mm to 0.5mm, it was so much better that it became the best keyboard in the world. And now, with the change from 0.5mm to 1.0mm, we’ve made it even better than ever: Welcome to the world’s best typing experience.”

Their 2018 MacBook is by far the best typing experience I had on a laptop. Other laptop keyboards would be happy with just writing down what I just typed, the MacBook goes one step further and doubles many letters. That's after 6 months of use and 95% of the time using an external keyboard.

Meanwhile, every time I take out my 6 years old Thinkpad T440s the keyboard feels nice instantly.

Don't the claim the best everything everytime they release a new anything?

And for a good while they could actually have made a believable claim for it

Now, it's just pure marketing speak

“Late Stage Apple”

“Peak Apple”

Yes.

Because logically you improve everytime, primarily why Cook comes onto stage every year saying:

"This is our best iPhone yet"

or insert whatever apple product you want.

Which is pretty redundant to say. No one would say the opposite and everyone expects an improved version.

It's just fancy PR talking points.

But it makes consumers feel better about their decision. Imagine you're a techie and wondering if this very minimal refresh to the iPhone is worth buying?

"It's our best yet" or "It's made for pros"

I mean, as you pointed out, it's fancy PR/textbook examples of good PR.

> Ladies and Gentleman, for the 17th year in a row, the future of robotics has arrived.

https://comb.io/8ajSgE

It feels like a single child is in charge of directing, writing, editing these marketing materials. It’s the “best”? Surely that alone will convince your customers who saw how you made the worst laptop keyboard ever when you shrank the depth. Surely you want to convince them you fixed that issue. Oh? You’re just going to ignore it and say its the best? The baseline price is $2400? In the highly competitive $1500+ laptop space? Bold move, Cotton.

They used the phrase "world's best pro notebook" three times in the first 200 words! How could they be wrong?

Katie Cotton retired in 2014!

Now they have nobody to make new words.

Pretty sure that was a dodge all quote.

Definitely a DodgeBall quote.

If you didn't think you had improved on the last version why would you release it?

When you write software presumably you think each release is the best experience each time?

The standard for releasing new software is that it should be better than its own previous self, in some way. It doesn't have to be better in all ways, or best in the world in any way, so long as the overall value proposition has improved. What rubs many people the wrong way about Apple is that they always claim to be the absolute best in all dimensions, as though engineering tradeoffs or accommodation to users' priorities and preferences are only for lesser companies. "Our car is the fastest and the most comfortable and the most fuel efficient, so you'd have to be an idiot to want anything else." It's the computing equivalent of snake oil, and people react to that.

They're running out of ways to word their puffery.

How does 1mm travel distance compare to the external magic keyboard for iMac?

I REALLY loved the short travel distance of .55mm :( I could type so much faster, bordering on 160wpm

> they claim "best typing experience" every time they release a new laptop

What do you expect them to say?

Maybe because they started out so low, and there was a long way to go with improvements.

My 2015 era MBA was great. They just screwed up, and told us they fixed it so many times it doesn't matter if they've actually fixed it this time (which they may have - https://marco.org/media/2019/11/mbp16-graph.png - we'll see in a few months) because we don't believe them. Typing this on a Surface with WSL2.

And it's never true (or hasn't been for awhile at least). It's clear they're engineering for thinness above all else, usability be damned.

I'm typing on a 2014-era Macbook Pro right now and I doubt any new scissor keys are gonna feel better than this. All of the newer Macbook Pros I've typed on have been terrible.

Scissor keys are the old ones that everyone likes. It was butterfly keys that people have the problem with. Apple is going back to the good ones.

It's not just the switch mechanism. The keys are too big and the gap between them is too narrow. I used to intuitively feel where my fingers were and pressing a key off center was much less likely to cause a typo.

> There’s also more space between keys — about 0.5mm. This difference is much more noticeable by feel than by sight. Making it easier to feel the gaps between keys really does make a difference.

https://daringfireball.net/2019/11/16-inch_macbook_pro_first...

Thanks. I looked into it and apparently the new gap is 2.5mm vs 3.5mm on the 2015. I hope it's enough.

If so, the next Air with the new keyboard and quad core Ice/Tiger Lake gets my money.

edit: or ideally a 14" Pro

Yeah, I was quite encouraged by the description of the changes in that blog post. I haven't had an issue so far with keys sticking, but literally every complaint I did have about the new keyboard (low keypress travel, keys too close together, touchbar too close to the keyboard, no physical Escape key) was addressed. If there was an easy way to trade in my 2018 15" Pro for a reasonable price I would totally do it.

Sell it before its value tanks.

This should be in bold type at the top of the page.

If they keyboard has actually been fixed, they might keep me as a user.

Many people find the old keyboard to be mushy after using the butterfly for a while

I bought my 2019 mbp specifically for the keyboard. It’s like a very shallow mechanical keyboard.

I've been interested in thin mechanical keyboards on laptops for a while now. Do all 2019 models have it?

If my peers experience is any indication, they all have the switches that break spontaneously and keys that start double-entering, stop working, or even detach from the keyboard.

I expect that their laptops won't have any working keys at 1 year of use.

This one is 2% thicker to accommodate the mechanism changes and a bigger battery.

But, sure, let's kneejerk yell about their engineering decisions.

This model is actually 7 mm thicker than the 2019 15".

Thank God. I'm so sick of Apple making their machines worse just to shave off a few nanometers from the chassis.

that's 0.7mm

Jony Ive isn't working there anymore. Coincidence? I Think Not!

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