The latest Mac design forced me to move to Windows again (thank you WSL) and I put the bad keyboard on 3 points:<p>- touchbar. Enough has been said about this so I will just say it's worthless<p>- bad keyboard. Butterfly keys are too problematic and as they fail you end up having to type harder so it registers. From there it's a slippery slope to a broken keyboard<p>- Overly huge trackpad. I don't see this get mentioned much but these things are massive on the keyboard. Takes up so much real estate so if you are typing on it you have to contort your hands and wrists so you don't accidentally brush it.<p>Does anyone really use the full size of that thing? Do people really find gestures to be all that important that you need as big a touchpad as this?<p>Currently developing on an X1 gen 6 and couldn't be happier
Ugh. Just change it back already!<p><i>I didn't have to pay for the repair because I had AppleCare—an expanded warranty program that offers free repairs for most hardware failures for three years—but the receipt Apple gave me stated that it would have cost more than $700 otherwise.</i><p>And having to buy $300 of AppleCare to get repairs for what are design defects in a >$3000 laptop is outrageous. Where are our lemon laws for laptops and smartphones??!
They should apologize not only for failing keyboards, but for creating a keyboard that is likely to give a lot of people repetitive stress injuries. The previous model started this trend. Most people will, hopefully, not experience this, but for people with RSI problems, each new generation of Macs has been worse and worse. Compare this to the 2007 MBPro models and there is simply no comparison. Unfortunately, the industry seems to follow wherever Apple goes blindly and does not care about healthy use of its devices. I expect a keyboard without any moving parts where one just jams on a glass surface (like the magic trackpad 2) any year now. I just hope we have universal healthcare in the US by then as worker's compensation is not too keen to pay for obvious work injuries like this in many states.
The problem of how to build a highly highly reliable keyboard was solved in the mid 1970s (to my knowledge, perhaps earlier). The hall-effect keyboard:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_technology#Hall-effect_keyboard" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_technology#Hall-effec...</a><p>I worked for a company that used them for data entry. People would type on them for 8 hours a day for months at a time. Reliably. It was hard to wear one out.<p>Too bad Apple won't start with something smart like that and miniaturize it for laptop use.
MacBook is supposed to be a no-trouble-device. You just buy once, sit back and enjoy for rest of the life.<p>Removing USB ports certainly didn't help. What's the point of a good battery life. If I've to carry connectors everywhere, I'm okay with carrying charger as well.