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Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

When people cite the great feat of putting in a 100Wh battery into this laptop they seem to keep forgetting that the 2012-2014 models had a 95Wh battery and the 2015 model had a 99.5Wh battery.

Only when flattening the design for the 2016 year did they reduce it to 76Wh.

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For the longest time the iPhones were getting thinner and thinner and hn/reddit complained that they really wanted chunkier iPhones with better batteries.

Then Apple turned the battleship and since 2014 (iPhone 6) we've gotten a thicker phone with improved battery life in every redesign.

I'm pretty happy about this new direction.

We're hoping undoing mistakes is a good step towards actual progress

As long as consumers are willing to shell out several thousand dollars per iteration of mistake-undoing then it's likely that some day you'll see actual progress.

In the specific case of the battery it's unlikely to get any bigger than 100Wh as that would make it illegal to take on planes in the US.

Some ruggedized laptops have two separate batteries for hot-swapping while keeping the PC on, and this way you can take a laptop with more than 100 Wh on a plane. The same way I take a 95 Wh laptop with a 75 Wh power bank. So never say never :)

I've never had a good experience with swappable batteries.

And replaced the keyboard with a design that feels like smashing your finger against the desk repeatedly.

The dimensions of this laptop are pretty comparable to the 2015 body, but 10% thinner, whereas the 2018 macbook was 14% thinner.

Have they fixed the damned keyboard? My early 2019 is still squishy.

The article mentions the new keyboard right in the subheader, multiple times in the first couple paragraphs, and has a whole section devoted to it.

TL;DR: Yes, it's a completely new keyboard design, with scissor switches, not butterfly, more key travel, slightly more key separation, more offset for the Touch Bar, and a physical escape key and separate Touch ID sensor.

You are going to have to put up with people asking about the keyboard for a while. They've been blowing smoke up our asses for two years about how they 'fixed' the old one. 4 revisions in it's... better, but still reminiscent of the sorts of keyboards that nobody would buy after trying.

The reaction is going to be, "Yeah, I know they said they fixed the keyboard, but really, did they fix the keyboard?" from quite a lot of people.

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