Apple’s butterfly keyboard failed by prioritizing form over function | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s butterfly keyboard failed by prioritizing form over function

theverge.com

68 pointsfortran7761 comments

This would be more of a discussion if we were given an inside perspective on the processes which led to this, whether there were countervoices, why they weren't heard, etc.

That would be fascinating. But Apple is so secretive, and punishes leakers, so that's pretty unlikely.

That would be a different article. This one is part of a series about physical controls, not business process.

I asked a high level apple engineer about the butterfly keyboard fiasco, and he jokingly replied that he'll consider releasing that info and other insider baseball at his funeral. He's not even allowed to tell many other Apple employees what he's working on. It's not easy to get an inside perspective or gossip from Apple employees.

Agreed. This is a fluff piece, nothing more.

The author even says that he thought the butterfly keyboards were better for typing -- i.e., for their purpose:

> I find the butterfly switches far crisper and snappier to use than the softer, mushier scissor-switch

His only point seems to be that Apple not did care about reliability, but I find that highly suspect.

It seems to me that Apple's problem was likely insufficient testing. If they had known that the keyboards would break in real-world usage, they wouldn't have shipped them.

There's only one butterfly keyboard worth talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_Butterfly_keyboar...

ThinkPads are an underappreciated marvel of industrial design, along with Siemens LOGO PLCs and IBM line matrix printers

Considering they're still one of the most popular lines of notebook PCs on the planet, I'd say they're about the right level of appreciated.

Jony Ive retires and all of a sudden Apple hardware starts making more "sense". I don't think that was a coincidence. The engineers are more influential than the designers at the moment.

Read a rumor somewhere that he made the edges of the MacBook in his prototype design so sharp to the point of serious discomfort to users, but he only changed it after Steve Jobs had to ask him about it.

edit: [1] Turns out it was the first iPhone.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20437041

There are still lines on my wrists from a previous aluminum Macbook of some variety I had.

The Jony Ive years will be remembered as that period when Apple made products thinner at any cost.

The day that the new keyboard was released, I walked over to the Apple store and tried it out.

I physically recoiled from it. It reminded me of the Atari 400 keyboard, a cheap membrane keyboard from the 1970s . . . not quite that bad, but still awful.

The Apple store employee who was watching me remarked on my reaction. "This keyboard feels terrible," I said, "Apple is going to lose a lot of money over it." Naturally the employee didn't care about my opinion.

Software engineers, always Cassandras.

Early on it seemed like Apple took a Bauhaus-like approach to design, where the motivating principle can be summarized as "form follows function". From an outsider's perspective, there's so much time spent discussing Apple's design on aesthetic merits that the focus shifted over time from making supremely functional devices to ones that signal high class and taste at the expense of more mundane concerns. Let's try to re-center the discussion on device/product design as driven first by function, and then by form.

I must be in a silent minority that likes quieter keyboards with less travel. So more butterfly keyboard please...

have you actually used it?

Wasn't the problem the high failure rate though, not the actual UX?

It was controversial for the very low travel even before the reliability issues started to crop up.

The desktop Magic Keyboard is about right for me. Less travel and pretty quiet. The butterfly keyboards were actually pretty loud.

Not so silent, there's several comment threads that show up in every article about how they're the best thing ever. I disagree for multiple reasons, but that's tangental.

Looks like that preference is enough to get you downvoted here :)

It was... okay until it failed... and then replacement also failed few months later.

It’s been my experience that coworkers with butterfly keyboards either type nearly silently or incredibly loudly. I’m not sure it’s worth the trade off.

If the keyboard ever worked when I needed it too maybe I would consider itr

Really, I think people see two things:

1. less reliable (probably true) 2. different (so hate it)

Like anyone else, I don't want less reliability. But the "different" in this case isn't at all bad--like you said, less travel. I don't need key travel once my nervous system has calibrated to the keyboard, and extra travel aggravates my RSI as well.

I don't actually mind the butterfly keyboard. Back in 2016 I got one of the first laptops with the it, the 12" MacBook, and I'm still using it daily. Also had a 2017 15" which I just upgraded to the new 16". Zero issues with both, and I haven't babied them at all.

While there's not a lot of key travel, it is very clicky and feels satisfying for me to type on. Individual keys are also very stable.

Not sure why you're being downvoted - my experience mirrors yours. I've just swapped from a 2018 MBP with the last (final?) iteration of the butterfly mechanism to a 2020 13" MBP with the new keyboard and in all honesty I preferred the butterfly.

Nonsense. The article makes several unfounded assumptions why apple designed such a keyboard. The keyboard is amazing! When it works.. I myself am a victim of its astonishing unreliability, would even join a class-action lawsuit against apple. But it's purely failed implementation.

Reliability was one problem. The other was that for many of us it was uncomfortable to use. I would actually feel some pain in my hands/wrists after using this keyboard for a while. Both the older keyboard and the newer keyboard are fine for some reason.

I always thought people were just exaggerating about this keyboard until I got a laptop that has one. I have a MacBook Air with a keyboard I love and use for personal stuff and my current client sent me a MacBook Pro. I was excited because the specs were crazy. Until I started typing. It was so bad and weird compared to my MacBook Air. So I assume it has that hated keyboard.

I had one at work. Thankfully it wasn't my main dev machine or main laptop. Whenever I used it my typing precision took a huge hit. The lack of key travel really messed me up in terms of "did I actually activate that key?" I was perpetually missing A's in my typing.

Maybe other people were able to get used to it, but I couldn't.

The level of contempt for paying customers on display is nothing short of stunning. With the price premium they get, they could afford to deliver superb quality and outstanding service. Instead they pocket the difference, every time.

What is most remarkable is that the customers keep coming back anyway.

Penetrating analysis. I am grateful that the journalists at The Verge have graced us with the singular insight that can only be borne from their evident engineering genius.

I just want everything about the Butterly keyboard and that era of Apple to be relegated to the past.

A lot of words to say nothing.

Yes it’s a bad keyboard. But the interesting story is in how a company that once prioritised quality of user experience came to make that choice.

The article is a set of maybes without any new insights.

Tech journalism in a nutshell.

Pretty sure this is a dead horse. Must be a slow news day.

Why are we rehashing this for the 1000th time??

Slow news day?

It's part of a series they've been doing for years highlighting the history of physical controls across all kinds of devices.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/31/18205570/b...

Because it is almost unbelievable that it happened; I can barely type on mine. I have all my hardware from 10+ years ago until now to compare with. Would return this one in an instant, if possible.

My first mac computer is the 2018 MBP which features the butterfly keyboard, it started failing after about 6 months of use. My previous laptop, a dell e6230 which runs Linux, feels almost as fast, especially for Docker stuff, has a fantastic keyboard and way better battery life. Can't see myself buying any Apple product after that.

I bought a 2017 MBP and figured that surely it can't be that bad in practice.

It was, to the point where I could barely type sentences without having to correct double-letter inputs. And that's without anything failing.

Thankfully the laptop was insured and I got the 2019 16 inch model now (with the escape key and a working keyboard). Touchbar with BetterTouchTool has proven to be much more useful than I expected.

But man was this a massive fuck-up. There's no way a 2000+ product should be able to malfunction in such a fundamental way!

EDIT: also, pain. I'm pretty flexible when it comes to getting used to changes in input, so I expected to be okay with less key travel and whatnot. But a day of using the new keyboards /felt/ different. My hands/wrists would hurt. This was only with the MBP with the new keyboard. Whenever I used my old MacBook Air or even the new Magic Keyboard I had no issues.

I can't tell for sure, but while it feels a lot better, even the new 16 inch MBP leaves my fingers a bit more sore than the mushier 2013-era Air.

They failed because the testing process failed. Apple sells mass-market consumer devices: they don't set out to sell failing hardware.

I think this is overstated. The butterfly keyboards were better day to day than the old style imho, and I say that as someone who had to have one replaced multiple times. It was the robustness that was an issue rather than the keyboard itself.

Apple can be accused of moving too slowly to when issues arose perhaps, but they did iterate trying to fix it and they’ve been very good in my experience with replacements.

Happily the new one is fantastic as far as I can tell so far.

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