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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

At home, I am still on my Early 2015 MacBook Pro running latest macOS with OpenCore patcher. As long as you don't use Safari because Cloudflare think you are a bot it is mostly fine.

The problem with all MacBook after my generation is their keyboard sucks. They have some variant and tiny improvement every year but it still sucks. The 1.5mm key travel is about the minimum I could take. Both butterfly and new scissors, despite giving them time I never quite come to terms with it.

But I guess this is one more year of macOS and perhaps two more for Safari + security. 2028 will be the final deadline.

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I actually disagree. I really like the keyboard on the current MBP and would describe it as a significant departure from the butterfly keyboard that came after your model.

That said, keyboards are personal preference, so I wish you luck in finding a good replacement. I also quite enjoy current ThinkPads.

Yeah, I thought the 2016-2019 keyboards were absolute ass, but they fixed it with from the M1 laptops onwards.

Actually, the keyboard mechanism that the M1 MacBook Pros got was from the 2019 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro (which was the first 16-inch MacBook Pro).

So the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro and the 2020 13-inch MacBook Pros got non-butterfly keyboards.

The early 2020 MacBook Air also had scissor switches. (Yeah, they released an overheating Intel model in 2020 just before the M1 Air came out.)

The 2016 to? keyboard was actually defective. (But Apple had a great silent warranty on it, which is what you really are paying for.) But I actually really liked the feel otherwise.

>(But Apple had a great silent warranty on it, which is what you really are paying for.)

After we fought very hard for it. Otherwise it cost you $300 or something just for keyboard replacement.

But yes the certain aspect of "feel" for butterfly was great. I really like its key stability. I often wonder if it wasn't so thin, had the typing distance of 1.3mm would reliability drastically increase and feels a lot better.

> After we fought very hard for it.

Interesting. I don't think there even was a 'keyboard replacement', because it was glued onto the mainboard. In any case, I just went into show them the sticky keyboard and got 50% of a new laptop back. Twice! Too bad you had to argue. (I think the defect wasn't just the keyboard but maybe the cooling or even the firmware.)

they improved over the butterfly keyboards of that era but the M1 and beyond keyboard are still significantly worse than before 2016. I recently used an older MacBook pro and the difference was quite staggering.

I dunno, I went from 2013 Pro to 2020 Air to 2024 Pro, I also use the previous Magic Keyboard (sans TouchID) and they all feel similar. The Magic Keyboard feels a lot like the 2024 Pro, the Air has less travel and has a sharper click and the old Pro has the most travel and is the mushiest. But they all feel like members of the same family, and are all very nice keyboards.

This is interesting. They all felt very different to me.

This actually reminded me a study 40% of people can't tell the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi. And then some 30% can taste the difference but can't tell which is which, 10% can tell but don't have preference.

I guess I am in the extreme minority. You could blindfold me and I could tell you by typing which keyboard is which. And this is not to brag but I much rather I don't have these high standard. Life would be a lot happier.

Tbh the M1 keyboard seems better than my 2012 MBP (and well, better than that clusterfuck or 1st gen butterfly design, but that ain’t saying much anyway).

Maybe it’s age, but the older one feels mushy

To me 2011 has slightly more key travel than 2015, but 2015 and M1+ seem to have about same keytravel but M1 is a lot "crisper". M1+ keyboard seems to uniformly actuate wherever you press it, whereas the shallower keycaps of 2015 keyboard mean that it feels different when you push it from corner vs center.

And I have just realise the 2020 Air is actually on the new scissors rather than butterfly.

So practically speaking you went from old scissors to new scissors.

Really? Maybe it's a modern laptop thing but I also don't like the newer ones. There is almost no travel, it's so weird, and I broke TWO keyboards in a year after having the previous one for 5 years. I have to be super sensitive with them, whereas I could type with a brick with my pre-2020 thinkpads (which also weigh less than 3lbs...)

I used a 2015MBP for many years, now a new Apple silicon one. The 2015 feels really annoying to type on now, too squishy, requires more force than feels natural. The new keyboards feel terrific in comparison. I never had reliability issues, despite spilling a pretty large amount of water on it once.

Interesting. I mean, it's still way less force than any average mechanical keyboard?

Modern Apple Scissor keyboards have a 64gf tactile force [1], that's pretty much in regular tactile switch territory. The travel is very short though.

[1] https://www.rtings.com/keyboard/reviews/apple/magic-keyboard...

As a former Model M user (and many thinkpads), it's called 'touch typing' and you have to adjust. Nobody is selling a 'brick' laptop in current year.

the x1 carbon isn't a brick lol

The new MBP is indeed significant departure from Butterfly. But the new scissors it is still not back to old scissors key travel. And only works well with touch typist.

If I remember correctly the current Thinkpad should have the same key travel distance as my MBP / old scissors.

But new scissors definitely have better key stability, something carried forward from butterfly ( although not as good as butterfly ). And for people who have preference with key stability it is a better choice.

They’re much better, for sure. They’re even pretty good.

But the 2015 keyboards are still superior.

Digression here but, man, Apple knows how to engineer a laptop that will keep on ticking. Every other laptop I've had is depricated in 2 years and virtually worthless by 5. My 2010 MBP isn't even remotely my daily driver but it is still kicking around. Only issue is a dead ram port (and there are some fixes for that I haven't attempted yet).

I think this is because Apple doesn't sell cheap laptops, the cheapest you can buy is the $1000 Macbook Air. If you spend your $1000 on something like a Lenovo Thinkpad or Dell Latitude, it'll also last for over 10 years of active usage. I have a 15 year old Thinkpad X201 that still works fine.

Nah, this is common for laptops or PCs in general.

I have a mid 2015 Macbook Pro 15", also with OpenCore. Running just fine. No issues with Safari and Cloudflake. Only thing is the battery was mostly dead. I replaced it with a iFixit diy battery kit, but that one died completely after just 2 years (out of warranty of course). Probably the controller board, as the cells were nowhere near empty. Now I have the choice to replace it with a cheap battery from unknown source or yet another iFixit one which costs almost the price of this laptop second hand. But I have lost trust in this iFixit product as others seem to have the same problem. Just sucks to have perfectly fine hardware locked behind another expensive battery repair.

>No issues with Safari and Cloudflake

How do you get pass [Verify you are human by completing the action below] on site like https://www.phoronix.com. ?

I have an m1 mbp and I have a 2015 sitting around somewhere and I can't really tell the different between to two. I skipped over the butterfly generation though.

The performance improvement on the m1+ just make it a no brainer for me though even if I hated the keyboard I'd carry around an external one just for the extra power.

I bought an early 2015 MBP (my favorite design) when the 2016 models where announced and waited until the M1 to buy a new one again, and the keyboard is good again.

I'm surprised... what encouraged you to update MacOS? I'm on the first M1 Macbook from 2020 and have not allowed a single OS update. The first thing I do with a mac is use Little Snitch to block all apple IP addresses, and delete all their built in apps. I still have an Air from 2015 and one from 2009, a Titanium from 2004 and a chunky old Powerbook 3400 from the 1990s that all run fine. One or two a decade.

But I never update the OS because I don't want to deal with anything that might break my environment.

What might break your envinroment is malware instead.

not if you don't download anything you don't trust, and know about every inbound and outbound connection.

I'm impressed at the way you've managed to extend the life of your hardware by the simple trick of not using it.

Funny. But is it somehow impossible to use a computer without downloading untrusted files?

Everything you didn't create is untrusted.

It seems an overly limiting way to interact with a device and you're giving up a lot of the benefits of a general computing device for some artificial but inconsistent rules.

To each their own though.

I pretty much only use computers to create. If I want to consume, I use a phone or something. I don't consume much.

So, like, if I boot up my Air from 2009, it's to write AS3 code and make a demo or something. If I boot up the one from 2015, it's probably because I want to use the Eclipse dev environment I was using then for a specific task. Both those things will simply not run if I upgrade the OS.

And not everything you didn't create is untrusted. I trust certain devs and ensure that if I install something, it is safe.

But it's much more valuable to me to have a snapshot in time of my own dev environments than it would be to have a piece of old hardware running a newer system. The hardware is barely worth anything. The state of the machine as it was, with all the software that was running perfectly on it at the time, is priceless.

Assuming all updates break everything is just as dumb as assuming all updates never break anything

Yeah, but why would I want to spend any of my time fixing anything on a machine from 2009, when the whole point is that it's a perfectly good system that does what I need when I need it?

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