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Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why Apple gets all this credit for making a reliable keyboard, something the rest of the industry figured out decades ago.

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The rest of the industry…? At work we have lots of Lenovo and HP laptops and those keyboards are, IMO, clearly inferior to my MBA 2012.

Compare the same price MacBook for the same price Lenovo, and you will see how the rest of the industry has clearly figured it out. Not shilling for Lenovo, but yeah, there's nothing special about it.

You can pry the x220 classic keyboard I've got on my x220 daily driver from my cold dead fingers.

And even if they did manage to pry it away, you can order a replacement keyboard and install it yourself without any special tools.

You may not like the feel, but the keys don't stop working like the 2015-2019 MacBooks.

Pedantic: the bad ("butterfly") keyboards started with the 2016 models: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300#:~:text=2016

That link only refers to the MacBook Pro. The 2015 MacBook had a butterfly keyboard.

You're right! I always forget about the MacBook.

But the 2015 MacBook Pro still had a keyboard deserving of the "best laptop ever made": https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever

ThinkPads are well known for having great keyboards. Apple’s do not compare.

I think it's fair to compare. Excluding Apple's recent scissor switch keyboard, they've both been reliable and serviceable. They've both had a following over many years. Aesthetically, I've preferred Apple's keyboards and I'm sure many people feel conversely.

Even regular cheap Lenovos have great keyboards compared to most laptops. Newer HPs are supricingly good, keys are too flat though and makes typing painful. Dells are atrocious, which sucks because 8-yrs ago they had among the best keyboards (together with Lenovo Thinkpads). Thinkpads are still ahead of the pack but they've been cutting travel lately in the thinner models.

The problem is, PC laptops used to have great keyboards until they all decided they had to be just like Apple.

People seem to like apple keyboards, and I believe that they sincerely do, but it never made any sense to me. Apple has always had average/poor ergonomics in my book, from their weirdly shaped mice to slippery phones that people keep dropping.

A bit salty, but definitely a kernel of truth there :P

Their earlier power adapters were notoriously susceptible to fraying (aka fire hazards), and the bricks had no grounding IIRC. I'm completely out of their ecosystem so I don't know if that's been fixed. (Again one of those things other manufacturers figured out years ago)

Because they’re usually making it a fraction of the size / depth of most of the rest of the industry.

At 0.13cm thicker than the dell XPS13, I don't think they're really doing anything crazy slim.

I bought a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 7th Gen a few months back. I can't say the keyboard is amazing. Compared any other laptop, sure it's better, but still subpar. I think old Macbooks had better keyboard.

They make a reliable + great keyboard

Lots of keyboards are reliable, few of them are 'good'. Lenovo is probably the only other one.

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