Took them 5 years to go back and restore the old school.
Great to hear a couple iterations ago they restored the keyboard. Now with dropping the touch bar and bringing back mag safe. My 2015 daily driver might see retirement.
Magic Keyboard was only introduced in mid 2020. And they are still not as good as MBP 2015 in terms of typing experience.
Magic Keyboard Key Travel - 1mm
MacBook 2015 Key Travel - 1.3mm
Key Spacing as well. They are tiny in Magic Keyboard Layout and it is harder to "sense" the keys apart.
>Took them 5 years to go back and restore the old school.
TrackPad, being too large in Post 2015 models causing much higher false positives ( touching the trackpad and moving the cursor )
On the Good side at least they are listening.
Reminds me of a blog post (via HN of course) that discussed how Apple is hurting itself by being obsessed with making devices smaller (Ugh, can't find the link).
A friend was grilling his boss who was fan boying over a particular iPhone release. Where the device was 10% thinner. In the real world it was a 1mm difference.
That is exactly what I like about it. Typing Feedback!
The comparative overall height of the keyboard modules is more than 0.3mm different, and the new computers are dramatically thinner and lighter than the previous ones. The overall effect is a substantial improvement. I don't use the touchbar too much, but it is a moderate improvement over F keys for me (I appreciate the return of a physical escape key).
Subjectively these two keyboards are pretty similar (I slightly prefer the previous ones). Scissor switches are all pretty mediocre; the shape to fit in a laptop just forces very sharp compromises on the design.
I also think making the key tops larger was a mistake, but it is also a relatively marginal difference in practice. Part of the goal may have been to increase the space available for international legends. (That's why IBM and every other vendor increased desktop-keyboard keytop size and switched from a spherical to cylindrical shape in the 1980s.)
In terms of typing experience alone, I like the Apple laptop keyboards from circa 2002 better than any of the laptop keyboards since. And the Mac Portable keyboard from 1989 is way better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable
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Edit: in response to: > TrackPad, being too large in Post 2015 models causing much higher false positives
Let me highly recommend getting a Japanese language keyboard, which looks like this: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/da70b0140c8a29...
... and then remapping the letter keys to be wider separated, along the lines of: http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/a578960e19e2c9...
Moving your left hand slightly left and your right hand substantially to the right relative to a typical US-ANSI keyboard will keep you from accidentally palm-swiping the trackpad.
The batteries are bottlenecked on FAA limits, not laptop thickness. And in future Mac laptops with ARM chips, cooling is no issue.
passengers may also carry up to two spare larger lithium ion batteries (101-160 Wh) https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/more_info/?hazmat=7
100Wh internal battery like the 16” MBPB + 2x160Wh, I don’t see an issue with FAA rules.
Which is what the parents meant. We dont need thicker laptop for bigger battery because we already hit that limit. And with lots of battery improvement coming in the next 5 years they could have made the same 100Whr battery smaller without sacrificing other features.
That is exactly the problem!
There are people who love the butterfly, they seems to prefer the mushy key typing experience. That is fine, but those same people dont hate scissors either.
But there are enough people hate the butterfly keyboard. To the point of hoarding 2015 MacBook Pro. You dont need any Internet forum to judge, we can judge the market by 2nd hand MacBook Pro pricing. There are demand for good quality 2015 MacBook Pro simply because of the keyboard.
The same goes with Trackpad, some people love larger trackpad, but they wont go mad with a smaller one. And then there are people who have palms that couldn't even use the new MacBook Pro.
Basically both of these are the wrong trade offs and compromise.
And both of these design decisions were all post Steve Jobs' making.
Did a little research regarding replacing the disk. A more performant drive costs around $120 USD. And the steps too replace it do not seem to tricky.
They were like hen's teeth when I bought mine second-hand. Daily workhorse.
Another rumor: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/29/apple-researching-keybo...
^ This might be the first iteration setting up for the end state of what will be the long term vision.
Exciting, love seeing them grind out the little (but ambitious) improvements on what most companies would consider ‘perfect as is’ product.
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For Apple at this point, I think, getting people to buy a 1100 MacBook + AirMax headphones is better than trying to get them buy not-so-obvious high end $1600 laptop.
And hoped that Apple would release a 'classic' line one day.
I'd view it differently. It took them 5 years for customers to be happy to see nothing more than the most regular and boring update while paying even higher premium on it than before.
In other words, because it took them so long to deliver a regular spec update, customers are now happy to pay higher margin prices.