Apple will pay up to $395 to people with broken MacBook butterfly keyboards | Hacker News Reader

Apple will pay up to $395 to people with broken MacBook butterfly keyboards

arstechnica.com

31 pointsgnicholas13 comments

Good lord, this keyboard design was horrendous. Everyone at the time tried to blame cruft and dust getting under the keys; the reality is that even the most meticulously clean users found keys double-activating after a few months of normal use. I worked in IT and my employer bought thousands of these models, and sure enough after maybe 6 months employees were coming to us desperate for a replacement... the 'guidance' we had to fix these things at the time was to blow compressed air 'gently' under the keys to clear any debris (which of course didn't help much, if at all). The newer M1 models don't really have this problem because they have the older "pre-butterfly" (think 2013 era) keys.

Exactly. Reports avidly regurgitate this bogus excuse, but the fact is that this keyboard was shit from day one. More Jony Ive trash that degraded Apple's products and insulted customers for FIVE YEARS... on top of the embarrassing emoji bar that they forced on users ("pro" users, no less) the whole time.

And the users who paid $4K for a top-of-the line laptop with a basically unusable keyboard get zilch. I had to put one of Apple's circa-2010 Bluetooth keyboards ON TOP OF my MBP keyboard to get work done.

The keyboard was so shitty that the Wall Street Journal mocked it with an entire article published without fixing any of the errors that it introduced. Then they have buttons on the page that you can activate to eradicate the defects, one kind at a time: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...

>on top of the embarrassing emoji bar that they forced on users ("pro" users, no less) the whole time.

The touchbar was alright. Honestly I miss it on my newer laptop, largely because in apps that made use of it, it was a productive tool. Does your debugger use F8, F7 or F6 to "Step Over"? Which one is "Step Into"? With the touch bar, the icons were literally right there on the keyboard.

Ideally I would have loved for the F-key row to have oled backed physical keys that could change their labels on the fly, or barring that, an F-key row with a touch bar above it, but overall it was a perfectly fine thing.

If you program regularly, I think you're going to know which keys are "step over/into/out." I've been using the Visual C++ debugging F-keys for almost 30 years, and rely on physical keys for finding them without looking down at my keyboard.

The touchbar was further gimped by Apple's baffling omission of at least one key that they petulantly refuse to put on their laptops: Delete. I mean real Delete, not Apple's Backspace key that they've mislabeled "delete." It's bad enough that they didn't have this key to begin with. It's even worse that when the Eject key became obsolete, they didn't make that Delete.

But worst of all was having a totally software-controlled touchbar but inexplicably leaving "Delete" out of the buttons you could add to it. At this point, it's just another example of Apple's infantile refusal to admit that they're wrong.

I program regularly, what I don’t do is use all the various tools in my IDE regularly, including the debugger. The context aware keys are helpful there. Especially if you use multiple IDEs in different contexts.

As for delete, your mileage may vary but I find fn-backspace to not be particularly annoying when I need it, especially since I’m already using fn-arrow keys for page up, page down, home and end. But I also don’t use two many applications that dedicate specific functionality to the delete key (IDEs being the exception, but since all that functionality is gated behind modifiers anyway, adding fn is effectively free.

Even if it did get debris thats no excuse. I get debris and crap all the time in the 2012 macbook, just takes a second to blow out versus ruining the laptop.

The failures were really a blessing in disguise for Apple. Without them they would have most certainly continued to push forward the butterfly, given how they always know better than their users.

No cover on this one unless you are a U.S customer ... oh well.

My MBP 2017 was an absolute disaster. The last time they fixed the kb issue for me (3x issues with that for me) it immediately afterwards got the infamous cablegate issue (another design flaw on not giving enough tolerance for the cable to flex) on it being returned.

I have barely touched it in the last couple of years because of the unusable screen on it. I swore to never buy another Apple product, and then succumbed to buying an ipad for my daughter to support her digital art interest. Still, never again.

I am much happier on Thinkpads in Linux anyway. I would find it hard to give up the tiling manager and benefits of declaratively managing my system on NixOS.

The interesting thing is that my father swore off apple products back when they quick did an end of life with no support on something in the error of the Apple IIgs - this was after spending years with them.

I find it interesting how this has now gone full circle with me now swearing off Apple (with the exception of that one ipad).

Wow, I will get more than 2x the trade-in value of my 2017 MBP from this settlement. Apple shows the trade-in value as $170, and I had to take it in several times for keyboard and other issues so I'll get $395.

I would say that this roughly makes up for the loss in residual value of this computer, though there was still the time spent taking it in, having it shipped off, etc.

Just sell it on ebay, apples trade in values are total jokes

Interesting - I had to have mine replaced twice. Third time is a charm, but it's still not great to type on.

> 4 years after the first retail sale of the unit

Oh well... ;-(

Now, about that trackpad and the broken palm rejection...

Isnt that sell than half of what they were charging to repai$$$replace them before the recall?

What about Dell for the raft of overheating 9550 XPS's with broken hinge posts?

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