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Comment by gernb | Hacker News Reader

agreed the larger trackpad is a net minus. I get all kinds of spurious input because of it sensing my palms

Butterfly Keyboard ( And arguably the new Magic Keyboard ) with little to no Key travel distance, along with Larger Trackpad which create false positive input were two key minus design features.

Unfortunately every time I pointed this out most of HN were quick to answer this is an user issue and not a design flaw.

I can see why most on HN (and actually outside of HN too) would say a larger trackpad is great, so I think you might indeed be in the minority opinion on this one. Even mainstream reviewers tended to list it as a positive.

But butterfly keyboard had been pretty much universally decried as a terrible mistake almost everywhere, including HN.

>But butterfly keyboard had been pretty much universally decried as a terrible mistake almost everywhere, including HN.

That was certainly not the case until the reliability problem got magnified in 2018. When the problem has been there since 2016. Before that Butterfly was somehow the holy grail for touch typist.

I remember reactions being more mixed. I and others always wanted more key travel, but I also knew people who loved it.

I don't believe it ever was the holy grail of touch typist. First, it was incredibly loud, and most people complained about it. The key travel distance was mostly cited as a con, not a pro. And only then the reliablity issues started to arise. But it didn't take 2018. This article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15496745) made it to the top of HN in Oct 2017, but people had already been complaining for months (See this article from February https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/some-2016-macbook-pro-o...).

A lot of us hated the butterfly keyboard from the beginning. Both here on HN and in other community situations. The noise interfered with calls when taking notes. I made a lot more typing mistakes due to the space being reduced between keys. I’ve typed on lots of keyboards over the years and got used to most of them but never could get used to that.

When they skipped or doubled keypresses started it was just the cherry on top.

You're not alone. I hated the butterfly keyboard, it was like tapping on stone.

Even the "returned to normal" keyboard on the new mbp is not nearly as good as the 2015 was in terms of tactile feel.

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