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Comment by virgil_disgr4ce | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna echo the sibling comment here because you're conflating different things. The point is that all of these seemingly weird things that were sometimes failures were part of more or less elaborate plans, and most importantly, that *commercial success for any given feature was not necessarily the purpose of the plan.*

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You're conflating what I wrote with "you're talking about commercial success".

Broken keyboards shipped for years, "we didn't think about thermal throttling", "we have no working replacement for a widely used professional machine", and "hey, here's this half-assed redesign that we still can't properly fix after release" have nothing to do with either commercial success or meticulous planning.

The keyboard issue was prolonged only by the nature of Apple's hardware release cycle. When the keyboard was released to the public, the next gen hardware was already way into the design/build cycle that it could not just be replaced. The fact they even had time to put the condoms under each key for the next year's model was surprising to me. They wanked the plug on the keyboard faster than I've seen them yank any hardware design.

> The keyboard issue was prolonged only by the nature of Apple's hardware release cycle.

You know that "meticulous planning" is supposed to include mechanical tests, catching edge cases etc. right? Instead, it persisted for 5 years with minor acknowledgements and minor changes.

It took them 3 years to put the "condoms" on, 4 years to add additional caps.

3 years after release Apple started offering free keyboard repairs to all users with a butterfly keyboard.

All that for a "meticulously planned" keyboard whose issues were immediately apparent within weeks of release.

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