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> Headphone jack? Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port? Gone. Floppy disk drive? Gone.

Also the parallel port. I remember the drama!

It goes the other way, too. When Apple put cameras in all of their laptops, the press relentlessly bashed them for wasting BOM on something so useless and expensive. Then the industry realized it was a good idea and followed suit. Similar for retina displays -- the term "High Definition" had become synonymous with "good enough" and ground PC monitor advancements to a halt for a decade. Phones were coming out with higher resolutions (not pixel densities, resolutions) than full-size monitors. Then Apple figured out how to market higher resolutions, the press mocked them for wasting money, but word got around that HD might not be the end-all of display technology and consumer panel resolutions started to climb again.

Here's a counterexample, a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet. 1GbE became synonymous with "good enough" and got so thoroughly stuck in a rut that now it's very typical to see 1GbE deployed alongside a handful of 10 gigabit USB ports and a NVMe drive that could saturate the sad, old 1GbE port many times over.

Sometimes taking risks results in a Touch Bar or Butterfly Keys. That's just the nature of risks. The only way to have a 100% feature win rate is to limit yourself to copying features that someone else has proven out, but if everyone does that then the industry gets stuck in a rut.

I'm glad Apple exists, even if I don't personally feel the need to fund their experiments.

The scary part? 1GbE is older than I thought. A couple weeks ago I replaced a 1GbE switch (gs524t) at my work and got curious. Said model came out in 2001 or 2002.

Copper gigabit Ethernet is about as old as USB 1.1.

>> Also the parallel port. I remember the drama!

Printers I can see. An entry-level HP LaserJet was $600 back in 2000, something not as easily replaced as a serial mouse or gamepad.

>> a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet.

They stuck it on the Mac Mini

As a $100 additional option...

(which granted, isn't too bad compared to the price of a new 10GbE card, but still...)

> 1GbE became synonymous with "good enough" and got so thoroughly stuck in a rut that now it's very typical to see 1GbE deployed alongside a handful of 10 gigabit USB ports and a NVMe drive that could saturate the sad, old 1GbE port many times over.

This has a few reasons:

- 10 GbE was, until quite recently, pretty power intensive and it still is more expensive and hot than gigabit

- Devices in LAN, especially those with high bandwidth usage, have become far rarer. A lot has moved to the cloud and the bandwidth of most people can't saturate 100 Mbit, not to speak of Gigabit.

- LAN as a whole has become rarer. A lot of people now only use WiFi with their phones or laptops, up to the point that most people now have (theoretically) faster WiFi than LAN.

Combined, there are few reasons to take the expense of putting a high-speed ethernet port on a device. Luckily, the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has decreased the jump a bit and you see those ports on a few consumer devices now.

10 GbE is still iffy even with CAT6 cabling over copper which complicates deployments and user experience. As a result, prosumer type devices like recent AMD x570 motherboards and the upcoming Intel Z690 based ones are including 2.5 GbE ports that are rated to work over CAT5E and provides enough bandwidth for a few hundred GBps with a lot less power usage on the switch side (something like < 4w / port seems common) and makes it easier for low cost passively cooled switches to work alongside a switching SoC that doesn't need to be terribly sophisticated to hit the latency requirements needed to support 2.5 GbE.

10GBASE-T is power hungry and unreliable, but dirt-cheap 10GBASE-LR and 25GBASE-LR transceivers work great up to 10km. If only they could figure out how to fit the transceivers into mobile-friendly packaging. But for a workstation they're great.

That's true, I actually run fiber in my home for that reason. I think the problem with fiber is, though, that the technology is pretty unknown to consumers and working with fibers is a lot harder than working with cables; they take a lot less abuse before breaking, for example. But if someone is going for 10Gbit+ in their home network, I can highly recommend fiber.

> 10 GbE was, until quite recently, pretty power intensive and it still is more expensive and hot than gigabit

PCIe 3.0 transceivers were 8Gb/s and supported preemphasis and equalization, closing the sophistication gap with their off-backplane counterparts. How many PCIe3+ transceivers has the average person been running (or leaving idle) for the last decade? These days a typical processor has 16Gb transceivers by the dozens and 10Gb hardened transceivers by the handful. I just counted my 10Gb+ transceivers -- I have 36 and am using... 10 (EDIT: 8/4 more, HDMI is 4x12Gb/s these days).

The reason why 10GbE is expensive has nothing to do with technology, nothing to do with marginal expense, nothing to do with power, and everything to do with market structure. Computer manufacturers don't want to move until modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers move and modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers don't want to move until computer manufacturers move.

These snags don't take much to develop, just "A needs B, B needs A," and bang, the horizontally segmented marketplace is completely immobilized. That's why the market needs vertical players like Apple who can push out A and B at the same time and cut through these snags, or high-margin players like Apple who can deploy A without B and wait for B to catch up. Otherwise these market snags can murder entire product segments, like we've seen happen to LAN.

No, it isn't because of reduced demand. People are recording and editing video more than ever, taking more pictures than ever, streaming more than ever, downloading hard-drive busting games more than ever, and so on. LAN appliances would have eaten a much healthier chunk of this pie if LAN didn't suck so hard, but it does, so here we are.

> Luckily, the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has decreased the jump a bit

Yaay, PCIe 2.0 speeds. 2003 called, it wants its transceivers back :P

Are you really suggesting that PCIe and ethernet are equivalent? There are so many differences, starting with the distance...

Power is a big differentiation. You need to send 10GbE over 100m (some break the standard and only offer 30). Have you ever touched a 10GbE SFP module or the heat sink of a card? They're quite hot and you need to provide that energy, which is not a problem on a desktop, but a big one on a laptop. If the laptop has RJ45, that is.

> modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers don't want to move until computer manufacturers move

Modems and routers only make sense once they serve a link that is actually beyond 1Gbit - which is rare even today. Also, these devices are minimal and the hardware required to actually route 10Gbit is a lot more expensive. Even Mikrotiks cheaper offerings today can't do so with many routes or a lot of small packages (no offense to them, their stuff is great and I'm a happy customer - it's still true, though).

APs are a bit different, as WiFi recently "breached" the Gbit wall (under perfect conditions). But there are already quite a few with 2.5Gbit ports to actually use that.

NAS, on the other hand, are a bit held back by the market. Still, high-models have offered either 10Gbit directly or a PCIe-slot for a long time now.

> People are recording and editing video more than ever, taking more pictures than ever, streaming more than ever, downloading hard-drive busting games more than ever, and so on. LAN appliances would have eaten a much healthier chunk of this pie if LAN didn't suck so hard, but it does, so here we are.

The professional video editing studios with shared server are already on 10 Gbit LAN, the stuff has been available for years. Pretty cheap even, if you buy used SFP+ cards. Switching was expensive until recently, but I'd say that the number of people which need a 10G link to a lot of computers are even less.

And LAN competes with flaky, data-limited, expensive 100 MBit lines (if you're lucky). 1GbE is beyond awesome compared to that and yet it lost, anyway.

> Yaay, PCIe 2.0 speeds. 2003 called, it wants its transceivers back :P

I'm not happy, either, but its better to at least go beyond Gigabit speed rather than stay stagnant even longer.

> Combined, there are few reasons to take the expense of putting a high-speed ethernet port on a device. Luckily, the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has decreased the jump a bit and you see those ports on a few consumer devices now.

I think the only thing driving 2.5/5/10GbE at all is that WiFi Access Points need it.

Compare the cooler for a 2.5GbE card [0] to that of a 10 GbE card. The fact that WiFi (which is what most consumers use) now supports those speeds surely helps, but 2.5GbE is also simply far easier to integrate and power.

[0] https://www.amazon.de/XIAOLO-Netzwerkadapter-Unterstützung-L...

[1] https://www.amazon.de/XG-C100C-Netzwerkkarte-RJ45-Port-802-3...

I agree that 2.5GbE is easier, and I still think AP backhauls are the primary driver for it. AP makers cannot sell multi-gigabit WiFi APs without a back haul that can support them.

I really which LAN made a comeback. There hasn't been a week without a video conference where someone had internet issues due to Wifi problems. In fact, from my experience, most times people talk about issues with their internet it's in reality Wifi issues. But few non-technical (and even technical) people consider connecting devices like TVs or Laptops by LAN, even if they hardly ever move and the router is close by.

All this talk about how fast Wifi can be made people think it's all they need. But in reality, building a Wifi network with fast speeds across a whole house while avoiding too much interference from networks around you (esp in inner cities where you can easily have 40+ networks in reach) is more work and more expensive than pulling LAN cables to the right places.

But LAN isn't sexy and no one advertises how fast a copper cable can be, it just doesn't sell products as well as talking about Wifi 6.

/rant

I am partly with you. But considering you have to actually put wires through walls and install sockets vs. just setting up an Wifi 6 access point, I don't see Ethernet making a huge comeback.

> ... a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit ethernet

10GbE was a bit of a mistake on several fronts.

We had become used to these 10x iterations with Ethernet from 10Mb to 100Mb to 1Gb such that 10Gb seems like a natural extension. But running that bandwidth over copper remains a significant technical challenge. For awhile I was using a Thunderbolt 10GbE controller and it was huge (basically the size of an old 3.5" external HD) and most of it was just a giant heatsink, basically.

In commercial situations, the issues with copper often result in using fiber instead. At that point there are less barriers to even higher speeds (eg 25Gb, 40Gb, 100Gb), which make a lot of sense in data centers.

Added to this, there's not a lot of reason to run 10GbE in a home setting or even in many small corporate settings. Even in larger corporate settings, you can go really far with 1GbE using switches, bridges and routers, possibly using higher speed backhaul connection technologies.

What should've happened is what has started to happen in the last few years: interim speeds (eg 2.5Gb and 5Gb). Hopefully these become more widespread and become relatively cheap such that someday they just displace 1GbE naturally.

On top of all of this, Ethernet is an old standard that uses 1500 byte frames. This actually starts to become an issue at 10+ GbE such that various extensions exist for very large frames (eg 9000 bytes) but this runs into issues with various hardware and software.

Probably largely because of the 1500 byte frames of Ethernet, the de facto standard for TCP/IP MTU is pretty much 1500/1536 bytes and this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as more and more infrastructure is deployed that makes this max MTU assumption.

The touch bar was fingers on glass. It's not appropriate for a professional device since it requires you to look down and doesn't lend itself to the "mechanical" use of devices that high-paced work requires.

Also, you can actually add the analog inputs yourself. The DIY keyboard community -- which is flourishing with options and new vendors -- has lots of options available. I myself have two analog knobs and one trackpoint on my keyboard. It's absolutely amazing.

> It's not appropriate for a professional device since it requires you to look down and doesn't lend itself to the "mechanical" use of devices that high-paced work requires.

Sure it could; it just has to beat the cost of the lookup. If you could have done some complex operation trivially with it, that couldn’t really be done with some keyboard shortcut, being a dynamic visual field would be fine.

Of course, volume sliders don’t fit that bill, and I don’t think anyone really found something that did… but it’s not some fundamental guarantee that it would be useless.

What keyboard do you have with a trackball?

Oops. Should have been "trackpoint" and not trackball. It's a pimoroni trackpoint breakout board.

G80-11800 of course

The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard has trackball options:

https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/

https://tex.com.tw/collections/keyboard

If the analog add ons are DIY or even extra money, then software developers cannot rely on them being present and won't develop good software and use cases for it. At least not most of them. The best you can hope for is niche software support.

So adding stuff yourself is nice (I do it myself!) but not a way to move the industry or even the Apple ecosystem forward.

Niche software support? My keyboard and the analog addons works on Mac, Windows and Linux with excellent support since it runs QMK firmware.

How well does this analog input work with, say, Photoshop?

Analogue input is pretty much a solved problem. Not only do we have standards for game controllers, but also MIDI control surfaces give you a wide variety of analogue physical controls. MIDI even comes with incredibly rich input automation.

Sadly, the only company I'm aware of producing that sort of hardware for use outside the music industry seems to be Loupedeck.

And yet a developer still can’t assume that the customer will have such analog input tools available.

I was really hoping Apple had a big leap forward in fingers-on-glass interaction planned. Imagine if the glass could kind of raise or move down so you could “feel” where the buttons were. Heck, even providing a few notches in the chassis, above the Touch Bar, for a finger to “feel” relatives where it was, and require a harder “press” to activate the Touch Bar, would have been likely a game changer.

But they didn’t. And I was always confused that the Touch Bar never got more love from the hardware developers.

That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to do something like that these days though.

It also wasn’t easy to build software for the Touch Bar from what I could gather. I had lots of ideas for little tools (think iStat-like gauges, but perhaps for things like the mic input level), but it wasn’t very easy to build one when I tried.

RIP Touch Bar. You might not be missed too much, but I bet something like you will come up again in a decade or two.

> That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to do something like that these days though.

I think it was more like they decided to add the equivalent of an Apple Watch to Macs to support TouchID and then asked "what else can we do with it?".

> That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to do something like that these days though.

Yes. It wasn't Jony. It came from the software side. I won't name who to protect the guilty.

    I was really hoping Apple had a big leap 
    forward in fingers-on-glass interaction 
    planned.

Me too, but even if they solved that challenge -- I think there's an even bigger and insurmountable challenge there: a sizable percentage of users, particularly "power users", frequently use their Macbooks "docked" and hooked up to an external monitor and keyboard.

While many people happily type on their laptops all day long with no external monitor or keyboard, there are also many people (me included) who think that's an absolute ergonomic disaster and greatly value the extra screen real estate of an external monitor.

So, honestly, there's no way the Touch Bar could have been good enough for me to use it.

The whole idea was just misguided.

What Apple should have done IMO was allow an iPad or iPhone to fill that role. I still do not understand why my iPad can't be an amazing accessory to my Mac. With the right software magic and integration, it could be everything the Touch Bar was while simultaneously doing a lot more, and is of course extremely compatible with external keyboard use.

Well, I can guess why, actually -- it would require a lot of coordination between the Mac and iDevice teams and that is challenging.

(However I'm encouraged -- Sidecar is a good first step. Let's see more...)

> It's not appropriate for a professional device since it requires you to look down

Apart from developers many professionals do look down all the time because they typically have other devices connected e.g. synths, photo/video editing rigs.

And Touchbar was designed much more for that audience.

I can see how you might make that assumption based on how the Touchbar has exposed functionality, but this was not the goal of the Touchbar as it was sold internally. It was sold as one of the next great UI affordances. It came from some of the same people that brought us Mission Control, the Dock, Exposé, etc. I worked on a lot of these features and I never use them. Shame on me.

On a laptop, that "look down" means looking at the bottom pixels of the screen.

The looking was never the problem, IMHO, the problem was execution and utility. It was actually distracting when there was adaptive completion results continually flashing. And the rest of the buttons were never great.

If every single dialog box flashed the buttons, that would be a win as it is easier and faster to tap the touchbar than it is to navigate the cursor and then click. But this obvious use case never really materialized.

And if, like most "professional" users, the laptop is operated via an external keyboard, the muscle memory never develops.

My touch bar almost always has "Display Connected: [Mirror Displays] [Extend Desktop]" on it. I can fiddle around and get it to show app-specific things, or hold Fn to see the F keys, but most of the time I'm using it it shows those useless multi-monitor buttons.

I'm sure there's some setting somewhere that defaults to showing whatever the layout for the in-focus app is, but it's failed to make me care enough about it to try to figure it out.

> This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence.

It's not ungrounded from the anecdotal evidence that these changes are coming after Ive's departure.

> I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal.

Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it.

> Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you. When your company releases an updated design to an existing product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and didn't veto it.

This is just shifting goalposts because you got called out.

You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something.

It's a common refrain on HN and it's never backed with proof.

And speaking of your first comment:

> Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.

... you realize that this is a new generation of MBP landing on the exact same cadence they've come out on in the last few decades?

So it makes perfect sense to have drastic changes land now regardless of who's in charge?

Not mention the fact it hasn't even been two full years since Ives left. And the fact the HDMI port was coming back leaked at the start of the year.

So unless you seriously think Apple designs a laptop in the course of a single year, it's highly unlikely he had no input on the current machine.

> You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives was personally pushing for something.

This is not a meaningful difference when he's in charge and it's a flagship product.

There's a big difference between "Jony Ive, as CDO, must have signed off on this, and thus bears responsibility for it" and "Jony Ive was pushing for this, for these specific reasons".

> When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you.

Agreed with this. When you're coming to the CDO position after 20 years of being a hands-on designer at that company, most recently as the head of both human interface and industrial design across the entire organization, and having been described as being the person with the most operational power at Apple, after Steve Jobs himself, even before being promoted, my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar. It is most likely that he set the goals that produced these designs, and that he was aware of and approved of them from the beginning. And I suspect that as a new C-level, he was probably even more hands on than that.

But since in this thread we are being asked to hold ourselves to a very high standard of rigor, I should note that I have not submitted this comment to peer review, or made my data available for replication at this time. I'm just basing this on, you know, how jobs work.

> my guess is that these design changes did not sneak under his radar

Ive is part of the Senior Leadership Team.

No major decision in the company sneaks under his radar.

But that doesn't mean he is responsible for every decision.

> When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you.

That's only because in your ignorant reality you have made it so.

The actual reality is that what constitutes a product is so much more than just the design. For example it includes what features should and shouldn't be there. And that is a decision largely coming from the Product team. Or how it works. Which comes from Hardware Engineering team.

All Apple had to was to have the touch bar over function keys, and nobody would complain at all.

THIS! Touch bar is cool but when they went and removed _the ESC key_ they failed. Both would be ideal

Touch Bars have had a separate, physical ESC key since 2019. I'm looking at one right now.

Due to years of vocal complaints from developers since 2016.

Sure, but "both would be ideal" exists. You can have an Escape key and Touch Bar, if you want.

It's not "ideal". Function keys are exactly that: physical keys. Something you can use without looking down at your keyboard.

I think two rows of function keys would be ideal!

Each with a little OLED display, please. (Why hasn't this happened yet??)

ESC itself doesn't cut it for me. With my resting hand position on the keyboard, my fingers touch the touch bar, and it always causes something either catastrophic or very frustrating. On a similar note, I'd gotten used to pressing Fn keys without looking at the keyboard. With touch bar, I have to carefully analyze the touch bar before doing anything with Fn keys. It's a very problematic experience overall. If it was a separate bar, I wouldn't have any of these issues.

I thought the touchbar was great idea but I hated that the function keys (and especially esc for a while) were sacrificed for it. They could have taken that 1cm of vertical space from the ridiculously huge touchpad instead and given us a ridiculously huge touchpad along with function keys and a touchbar.

> The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog input + rich display device.

It just can't work with people like me that never look down at their keyboard. I'm not trying to be elitist, it's the honest truth. I wanted to love the Touch Bar, tried plugins like Pock, but in the end no matter how hard I tried I can't help and force myself and interrupt what I'm doing to look down, it just doesn't make sense.

It might have worked with some kind of haptic feedback device?

It was tried. Many, many people spent many, many hours inside of Apple trying to make the Touchbar more useful. The simple fact was that looking down at it was a context shift and, in general, no one wanted to do it. It exposed functionality that you would eventually learn to drive from the keyboard.

You're not meant to look at your keyboard. It's simply not efficient.

> Analog knobs, jog wheels, sliders, trackballs, etc. are tragically missing.

Fwiw they are readily available by way of USB (e.g. MIDI) controllers. There are loads of dedicated knobs, faders, pads, etc. with a large amount of software to customize and translate those inputs (in addition to the array of software supporting them natively)

Obviously that would be external to the computer, but I think given the highly specific nature of analog controls it makes sense for these to be external. I'm having difficulty imaging a set of analog controls that would be at the same time universally useful and efficient in terms of weight and space utilization.

I actually really like the TouchBar except for the dramatic input lag. The input lag is so damn high that I never ever use it. If you could swipe left/right on it without holding down first, as on an iPhone, and if touch events generally had the same responsiveness as on an iPhone, I think everyone would have loved it much more. RIP TouchBar.

I used BetterTouchTool to add a second volume slider with no delay and no on-screen UI, for changing the volume while I watch something :)

I highly recommend using BetterTouchTool to get the most out of it if you still have a device with the touch bar.

I love BetterTouchTool, and it does help, but the input lag is still too high. And as far as I know, even with BTT, there’s no way to get a proper swipe interface that removes the “touch and hold” delay.

What I don't get about the touch bar is: Why didn't they put it above the F-keys as an additional input? There's room there. Why remove the F-keys (and, even more insanely, the ESC key)? People were more upset about that than any limitation in the touch bar's usability. It obviously adds some possibilities. It's just that some programs actually use the F-keys and have for decades. They provided a no-look keypress feedback for many tasks. What ever was the genius idea of taking that away?

The touch bar was just awful. Not only did it lack software support, but occasionally it would just become non-responsive. And that's really bad when you are trying to mute or turn the volume down quickly, and you have to wait a couple seconds for it to recognize touch input again, or fall back to the mouse.

Also it's on the keyboard where you're not looking. If you want analog controls, either make them tactile - like a physical dial or slider - or just make the display a touch screen.

> mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype

And this is why I believe more in the Ivy story than this one.

If you're a mechanical engineering group mismatch between prototype and production is MechEng 201 pretty much.

You wanna put out a new keyboard fine, but test the heck out of it. Let people have a go at it, put force onto it, spread some food on it, etc

Unless that mechanical group really think keyboards are a toy and don't need reliability, in this case they don't belong there

> No, this was some Apple-internal mechanical engineering group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in a prototype vs. full-scale factory production + poor estimation of reliability in a wide variety of contexts over a longer period of time

Okay, but...what caused them to try to make a keyboard that thin in the first place? GP is suggesting that it was driven by Ive, which you dispute, but you only give an alternative explanation for the "what", not the "why".

>and no evidence that including it had anything to with making laptops expensive as a goal.

It is product differentiation. The MacBook Pro 2016 redesign was delayed by a year due to Intel's CPU problems. The touchbar Macbook also had higher ASP from the start. It was the Post PC era. Everyone was suppose to leave the PC ( including Mac ) platform to Tablet. It doesn't get any clearer than that. Even making an iPad ads "What's a Computer". Making an ASP increase is a typical move of a market where you want to milk it. Did I mention they completely neglect Mac Pro for years?

>Jony Ive was its patron

Despite media wants to claim otherwise at the time and had shills cover it up. He spend most of his time on Apple Retail redesign and Apple Park. But iPhone X and Macbook / MacBook Pro was his vision of how the ultimate MacBook Pro and iPhone would be as he said so himself. He was named CDO in 2015, along with some design team restructuring. The “Designed by Apple in California” chronicles 20 years of Apple design photo book came out in 2016. When he finally left in 2019, the media and shills were suggesting he hasn't actually been on product design for quite a few years. His earlier work on Apple in 2011+ was iOS 7 re-design. ( After Scott Forstall was out ) And we all know how that went as they spend the next 3 years to iterate out of it. To the point their old UX design head had to retire. And if you look at the changes to Apple Retail Store redesign, they were the same. Form over function. Partly Jony's fault, partly Angela.

>Nobody ever set out to make a “worse experience” or higher cost.

Apple filled many patents where they were looking at keyboard on a flat piece of glass with Force Touch and 3D Touch. These patents were specific to computer. Higher BOM cost are often used as moat in any luxury items.

>to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could...

If it wasn't for the butterfly keyboard. The internet would not have a group of people and product reviewer now talking about key travel distance. The thin keyboard has a similar typing experience as typing on glass......

>There are many suboptimal features...

No one fault them for trying. But the first report of keyboard problem came out in 2016 from MacBook users. Less than one year after its launch even before the MacBook Pro TouchBar. Apple constantly delete report of the problem on its support forum. The whole thing only gotten attention when an online press themselves decide to blog about it and went viral. That was 2018. They stopped reporting Mac user satisfactory in 2018, both in keynote and in investor meeting. It took nearly 3 years of ranting before Tim Cook even made a Keyboard Service Program.

Basically without Steve Jobs, no one had the gut to say, fuck this. This isn't working. Close it down. Work on a alternative or go back to where it was and we make a Service Programme. Instead they drag on it for years. Without product sensibility and direction.