7 ms·

At the start of the year I bought a full spec 15" MBP. Two weeks in the B key stopped working so I took it to the Apple Store and they literally gave me a brand

At the start of the year I bought a full spec 15" MBP. Two weeks in the B key stopped working so I took it to the Apple Store and they literally gave me a brand new one. Why did the B key stop working? Apparently it was a crumb. So I had a total system replacement of a £3000 laptop because of a crumb. Insane. Yes I know the broken one will be repaired and re-sold as a refurb but still that is just crazy. I ended up returning the MBP for a refund anyway as I really didn't enjoy the new butterfly keyboard. I found it quite painful to type on for more than about 20 minutes. I strongly feel the latest generation MBP is a step backwards in what a "professional" wants and needs from such a machine. Sure make the consumer MacBook model as thin as possible but don't butcher the Pro model to save 0.2mm by introducing a god awful keyboard and removing a bunch of crucial ports so we have to rely on bloody dongles! Ninja Edit: Forgot to mention how much I hated the TouchBar. What sucks is the actual idea of the touchbar is pretty nice but replacing the function keys with it on a Pro machine is idiotic. They could have easily added the touchbar while keeping the function keys but decided not to probably to be minimal/simple.

eric_h 8y ago
> I found it quite painful to type on for more than about 20 minutes I keep hearing this. I've been using the new keyboard for > 1 yr and I literally have no complaints. I have adjusted my typing style to a bit lighter of a touch as the keys don't travel as far, but I've not experienced any discomfort.
- dharmab 8y ago
  I don't find it painful, but it is noticeably less pleasant to type on even compared to other laptops.
  - always_good 8y ago
    I found the keyboard to be amazing for the first week. But the clicky punch immediately degrades even if you don't get a nanoparticle under one of your keys. They regress quickly to a mushy tactile feel. It's as if nobody at Apple tested the keyboard for more than a week, nor outside of a pristine cleanroom. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the root cause of all this, because I could see why someone would think the keyboard was an upgrade if that was the extent of the QA testing. If the keyboard felt like it did the first week but for four years, I would consider it an upgrade. But it's a comically far cry from that.
    - eric_h 8y ago
      I agree that the keyboard doesn't have quite the same "snap" that it did when it was new, but I still honestly prefer it to the older MacBook keyboards. Whenever I type on one they feel so squishy in comparison.
    - ordinaryradical 8y ago
      I really doubt they didn't do long-term QA on the mechanism, but I could definitely see how their emphasis on secrecy might have kept these keyboards in a room that was far cleaner than a normal laptop environment in many ways.
- anonymousab 8y ago
  I guess it just goes to show how different everyone types from each other and how well of a compromise the previous keyboard turned out to be, even if unintentionally.
  - eric_h 8y ago
    I suppose. On the other hand if you type on every keyboard like it's an IBM Model M, any keyboard that isn't a high travel mechanical keyboard is going to be uncomfortable. I adjusted my typing style to fit the new MacBook keyboard, and I have no complaints.
    - samatman 8y ago
      I had no complaints about the butterfly keyboard (touchbar is meh) until I started using a mechanical keyboard again. There was a learning curve teaching my fingers to use two distinct pressure techniques depending on the surface. I've had keys stick and unstick. I'm glum about it. Feels like a matter of time before one doesn't unstick.
    - syshum 8y ago
      The second I need change to accommodate my hardware, is the second that hardware is replaced.... Of course I am typing this is on an mechanical keyboard with Cherry Switches, which is the only way to type
      - jodrellblank 8y ago
        The DataHand has magnetically held keys. If you press them too gently, they don't move at all, so there's no chance of pushing them a bit but them not registering. When you push hard enough to move them, they pass through an optical sensor and then can move a lot further, so there's effectively no equivalent to keys bottoming out, or the feeling of jamming your finger into a hard surface. It's such a good design to invert both those problems and make them non-problems, I'm a bit sad I haven't seen it anywhere else on a more common style of keyboard.
- satysin 8y ago
  I think the problem for me is that I use several different machines and they all feel similar enough that when I had to use the MBP it was so different that I never got totally used to it. Maybe it if were my only machine I would be okay with it in the long term. Guess I will never know though.
- MrScruff 8y ago
  Same, I love the keyboard on mine. The older keyboards feel mushy in comparison, I enjoy the solid click I get with the new design.
- confounded 8y ago
  > I have adjusted my typing style to a bit lighter of a touch as the keys don't travel as far... At work I’m surrounded by people rattling away in the latest MBP (I don’t use one myself). From listening to the room as machines were replaced, I actually got the impression that the opposite was true; it sounded like people were typing harder. From trying one of the keyboards out, I found myself typing more percussively too. Without tactile feedback I ended up slapping the keys pretty hard to be certain about actuation/bottoming-out (the same thing?).
- crazygringo 8y ago
  Indeed, that's actually why I love it -- typing with a lighter touch means I can actually type for much longer than the old keyboard, without discomfort.
- pokemongoaway 8y ago
  My experience is that people who LOVE touch bars, keyboards with less travel, touch screens instead of keyboards, and iPads instead of laptops - are less human. I'm not saying people with these preferences are not human, but I would just argue that they are less human than someone who fully experiences the humanity of a quality keyboard and mouse. Whereas someone who experiences no reduction in humanity when these pleasures are removed should be questioned! What do you experience as pleasures in your life? Do you enjoy counting grains of sand? Do you experience more discomfort when your super flat keyboard is dirty than when someone replaces your more ergonomic instrument with a less ergonomic one? Someone has to ask the hard questions! ;)
piinbinary 8y ago
I find it endlessly confusing how Apple focuses only on how a machine visually looks and gives little thought to how it physically feels. I never enjoy typing on a mac laptop - the metal palm rest tends to feel either very cold or rather hot, the sharp edge of the laptop is uncomfortable to the wrists, and the keyboard itself is very shallow and unsatisfying to type on.
- bangonkeyboard 8y ago
  > the sharp edge of the laptop is uncomfortable to the wrists This touches on a minor point I don't see brought up much: the corners of the notch to open the lid on the new Touch Bar MBP are surprisingly sharp, sharper than the previous generations. Combined with other similarly sharp, almost unfinished edges around the machine, I see this as a sign of Jony Ive's disdain for human users versus his aluminium designs.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    I thought Jony was off designing the spaceship and left his underlings to design the products the past couple years. Apple made a point of saying he's back now.
    - bangonkeyboard 8y ago
      Without delving too much into Apple Kremlinology, while all product design is a team effort, Jony Ive was always the head and face of Apple's. He and his underlings have a shared perspective and culture, and the corner issue brings to mind an earlier example: During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model's sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive's worst tendencies. [0] Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles. [0]: https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphone/ https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphon...
zer00eyz 8y ago
> So I had a total system replacement of a £3000 laptop because of a crumb. Insane. What is more insane is that the KB is riveted to the top of the shell. If you want to replace it (good luck finding a kb) you have to drill out all the rivets.
- satysin 8y ago
  Yes this is why I had to have a full replacement. Apparently Apple have to return the unit to their factory (in China?) to be stripped and reused.
ctorstens 8y ago
"B" was the first to go for me as well! So far the only one, but i imagine more are on the way.
caconym_ 8y ago
I have a Macbook 12" that's a couple of years old and it's probably my favorite computer out of all the ones I've owned in my life. The keyboard doesn't annoy me, even though my go-to when I'm at a desk is a chunky Topre board (HHKB2). I don't think it's exactly the same as the one in the more recent Pro models, but it's similar in terms of what people don't like. The thing I really don't like on the new MBPs (like my work machine) is definitely the Touch Bar. I think it's a terrible idea and not worth including on any machine to begin with, let alone if it's going to replace the physical escape and F-keys. If it becomes impossible to buy the top-spec Apple ultralight laptop without a Touch Bar, I'm probably done buying Apple products. Same if I have any stupid issues with my current machine before I get a few more years out of it.
mike_ivanov 8y ago
> a step backwards in what a "professional" wants and needs from such a machine An observation: I'm typically working in coffeeshops; over the last couple of years the share of MacBooks in those places went from nearly 100% to like virtually none. Hipsters and younger people are all on Windows 10 now. Rarely you can see a Mac, and it almost invariably is of a previous generation.
- hedora 8y ago
  The fraction of Linux laptops at work has skyrocketed as well. That probably shows up at Microsoft as Win10 revenue, fwiw.
- archagon 8y ago
  Less app development, more web development?
- ithinkinstereo 8y ago
  Interesting, I've seen the opposite trend, which is especially noticeable overseas (5 years ago you would see virtually no MacBooks, now its 50%+).
- wepple 8y ago
  That’s a really interesting datapoint, mind sharing what city that is? In NYC I’d say it’s 80-90% macbook
  - mike_ivanov 8y ago
    Vancouver, BC.
- navidfarhadi 8y ago
  To add my own anecdotal data point, here in the Mountain View and Palo Alto area it used to be 95% MacBooks in coffee shops 6-7 years ago and now it is more like 80-85%. Pretty much every laptop that isn't a MacBook is either a ThinkPad, Dell Latitude/XPS, or Microsoft Surface.
lobster_johnson 8y ago
Similar story here. I managed to spill coffee on my MacBook Pro 2015, which I had been really happy with -- great performance (max out with CPU, RAM and 1TB SSD). I got the new 2017 model, and really hated the keyboard, but also really disliked the Touch Bar and lack of Escape button. I'm not at all concerned with the lack of USB or SD card reader, though I was disappointed with the lack of performance improvements over the 2015 model. So I returned it, and bought a brand new 2015 model. Except it turns out they changed it! It no longer has a dedicated AMD graphics card. It's an integrated Intel Iris Pro with less VRAM, and it seems really underpowered compared to the old AMD Radeon on my previous model. The lower graphics performance is especially noticeable if you turn the Retina setting to scaled (like 1.5x, which I prefer). It's not just that apps render a bit more slowly -- I get the sense that there's some GPU memory transfer bottleneck that's happening that causes sudden pauses in UI rendering across the entire OS. And it's something that makes the whole computer slow down with use; rebooting (or restarting Safari) speeds things up again. Typing in Slack or VSCode has noticeable lag, and switching between Spaces results in a significant pause, and the switching animation stutters something fierce. I would go so far as to say that scaled Retina is unusable on this model. I looked the model ID, and it's "MacBookPro11,4". The model that has a dedicated GPU is "MacBookPro11,5" and was discontinued in October 2016. So it looks like it's impossible to get a 2015 MBP with a dedicated graphics card right now. You can't plug in an external GPU, either; while High Sierra now supports it, it's only supported on the newer models via Thunderbolt 3. This is really frustrating. I've been using Apple laptops since 2006, and this is the first time when I can genuinely say that none of their products are good enough. I've even looked at the possibility of switching to a Linux laptop, but Linux distros are nowhere near macOS in terms of cohesiveness and UI, and while the laptop models I've looked at (ThinkPad T480S, Dell XPS 15, System76 Oryx Pro) admittedly have much better specs than Apple, none of them stand out as being particularly good. I'm now hoping that Apple will see sense this year and offer a non-Touch-Bar model with some kind of non-butterfly keyboard. But I'm not hopeful.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  Honestly, your best bet might be to switch to Windows and make do with the WSL.
- 8y ago

eric_h 8y ago

> I found it quite painful to type on for more than about 20 minutes I keep hearing this. I've been using the new keyboard for > 1 yr and I literally have no complaints. I have adjusted my typing style to a bit lighter of a touch as the keys don't travel as far, but I've not experienced any discomfort.

dharmab 8y ago
I don't find it painful, but it is noticeably less pleasant to type on even compared to other laptops.
- always_good 8y ago
  I found the keyboard to be amazing for the first week. But the clicky punch immediately degrades even if you don't get a nanoparticle under one of your keys. They regress quickly to a mushy tactile feel. It's as if nobody at Apple tested the keyboard for more than a week, nor outside of a pristine cleanroom. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the root cause of all this, because I could see why someone would think the keyboard was an upgrade if that was the extent of the QA testing. If the keyboard felt like it did the first week but for four years, I would consider it an upgrade. But it's a comically far cry from that.
  - eric_h 8y ago
    I agree that the keyboard doesn't have quite the same "snap" that it did when it was new, but I still honestly prefer it to the older MacBook keyboards. Whenever I type on one they feel so squishy in comparison.
  - ordinaryradical 8y ago
    I really doubt they didn't do long-term QA on the mechanism, but I could definitely see how their emphasis on secrecy might have kept these keyboards in a room that was far cleaner than a normal laptop environment in many ways.
anonymousab 8y ago
I guess it just goes to show how different everyone types from each other and how well of a compromise the previous keyboard turned out to be, even if unintentionally.
- eric_h 8y ago
  I suppose. On the other hand if you type on every keyboard like it's an IBM Model M, any keyboard that isn't a high travel mechanical keyboard is going to be uncomfortable. I adjusted my typing style to fit the new MacBook keyboard, and I have no complaints.
  - samatman 8y ago
    I had no complaints about the butterfly keyboard (touchbar is meh) until I started using a mechanical keyboard again. There was a learning curve teaching my fingers to use two distinct pressure techniques depending on the surface. I've had keys stick and unstick. I'm glum about it. Feels like a matter of time before one doesn't unstick.
  - syshum 8y ago
    The second I need change to accommodate my hardware, is the second that hardware is replaced.... Of course I am typing this is on an mechanical keyboard with Cherry Switches, which is the only way to type
    - jodrellblank 8y ago
      The DataHand has magnetically held keys. If you press them too gently, they don't move at all, so there's no chance of pushing them a bit but them not registering. When you push hard enough to move them, they pass through an optical sensor and then can move a lot further, so there's effectively no equivalent to keys bottoming out, or the feeling of jamming your finger into a hard surface. It's such a good design to invert both those problems and make them non-problems, I'm a bit sad I haven't seen it anywhere else on a more common style of keyboard.
satysin 8y ago
I think the problem for me is that I use several different machines and they all feel similar enough that when I had to use the MBP it was so different that I never got totally used to it. Maybe it if were my only machine I would be okay with it in the long term. Guess I will never know though.
MrScruff 8y ago
Same, I love the keyboard on mine. The older keyboards feel mushy in comparison, I enjoy the solid click I get with the new design.
confounded 8y ago
> I have adjusted my typing style to a bit lighter of a touch as the keys don't travel as far... At work I’m surrounded by people rattling away in the latest MBP (I don’t use one myself). From listening to the room as machines were replaced, I actually got the impression that the opposite was true; it sounded like people were typing harder. From trying one of the keyboards out, I found myself typing more percussively too. Without tactile feedback I ended up slapping the keys pretty hard to be certain about actuation/bottoming-out (the same thing?).
crazygringo 8y ago
Indeed, that's actually why I love it -- typing with a lighter touch means I can actually type for much longer than the old keyboard, without discomfort.
pokemongoaway 8y ago
My experience is that people who LOVE touch bars, keyboards with less travel, touch screens instead of keyboards, and iPads instead of laptops - are less human. I'm not saying people with these preferences are not human, but I would just argue that they are less human than someone who fully experiences the humanity of a quality keyboard and mouse. Whereas someone who experiences no reduction in humanity when these pleasures are removed should be questioned! What do you experience as pleasures in your life? Do you enjoy counting grains of sand? Do you experience more discomfort when your super flat keyboard is dirty than when someone replaces your more ergonomic instrument with a less ergonomic one? Someone has to ask the hard questions! ;)

piinbinary 8y ago

I find it endlessly confusing how Apple focuses only on how a machine visually looks and gives little thought to how it physically feels. I never enjoy typing on a mac laptop - the metal palm rest tends to feel either very cold or rather hot, the sharp edge of the laptop is uncomfortable to the wrists, and the keyboard itself is very shallow and unsatisfying to type on.

bangonkeyboard 8y ago
> the sharp edge of the laptop is uncomfortable to the wrists This touches on a minor point I don't see brought up much: the corners of the notch to open the lid on the new Touch Bar MBP are surprisingly sharp, sharper than the previous generations. Combined with other similarly sharp, almost unfinished edges around the machine, I see this as a sign of Jony Ive's disdain for human users versus his aluminium designs.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  I thought Jony was off designing the spaceship and left his underlings to design the products the past couple years. Apple made a point of saying he's back now.
  - bangonkeyboard 8y ago
    Without delving too much into Apple Kremlinology, while all product design is a team effort, Jony Ive was always the head and face of Apple's. He and his underlings have a shared perspective and culture, and the corner issue brings to mind an earlier example: During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model's sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive's worst tendencies. [0] Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles. [0]: https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphone/ https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphon...

zer00eyz 8y ago

> So I had a total system replacement of a £3000 laptop because of a crumb. Insane. What is more insane is that the KB is riveted to the top of the shell. If you want to replace it (good luck finding a kb) you have to drill out all the rivets.

satysin 8y ago
Yes this is why I had to have a full replacement. Apparently Apple have to return the unit to their factory (in China?) to be stripped and reused.

ctorstens 8y ago

"B" was the first to go for me as well! So far the only one, but i imagine more are on the way.

caconym_ 8y ago

I have a Macbook 12" that's a couple of years old and it's probably my favorite computer out of all the ones I've owned in my life. The keyboard doesn't annoy me, even though my go-to when I'm at a desk is a chunky Topre board (HHKB2). I don't think it's exactly the same as the one in the more recent Pro models, but it's similar in terms of what people don't like. The thing I really don't like on the new MBPs (like my work machine) is definitely the Touch Bar. I think it's a terrible idea and not worth including on any machine to begin with, let alone if it's going to replace the physical escape and F-keys. If it becomes impossible to buy the top-spec Apple ultralight laptop without a Touch Bar, I'm probably done buying Apple products. Same if I have any stupid issues with my current machine before I get a few more years out of it.

mike_ivanov 8y ago

> a step backwards in what a "professional" wants and needs from such a machine An observation: I'm typically working in coffeeshops; over the last couple of years the share of MacBooks in those places went from nearly 100% to like virtually none. Hipsters and younger people are all on Windows 10 now. Rarely you can see a Mac, and it almost invariably is of a previous generation.

hedora 8y ago
The fraction of Linux laptops at work has skyrocketed as well. That probably shows up at Microsoft as Win10 revenue, fwiw.
archagon 8y ago
Less app development, more web development?
ithinkinstereo 8y ago
Interesting, I've seen the opposite trend, which is especially noticeable overseas (5 years ago you would see virtually no MacBooks, now its 50%+).
wepple 8y ago
That’s a really interesting datapoint, mind sharing what city that is? In NYC I’d say it’s 80-90% macbook
- mike_ivanov 8y ago
  Vancouver, BC.
navidfarhadi 8y ago
To add my own anecdotal data point, here in the Mountain View and Palo Alto area it used to be 95% MacBooks in coffee shops 6-7 years ago and now it is more like 80-85%. Pretty much every laptop that isn't a MacBook is either a ThinkPad, Dell Latitude/XPS, or Microsoft Surface.

lobster_johnson 8y ago

Similar story here. I managed to spill coffee on my MacBook Pro 2015, which I had been really happy with -- great performance (max out with CPU, RAM and 1TB SSD). I got the new 2017 model, and really hated the keyboard, but also really disliked the Touch Bar and lack of Escape button. I'm not at all concerned with the lack of USB or SD card reader, though I was disappointed with the lack of performance improvements over the 2015 model. So I returned it, and bought a brand new 2015 model. Except it turns out they changed it! It no longer has a dedicated AMD graphics card. It's an integrated Intel Iris Pro with less VRAM, and it seems really underpowered compared to the old AMD Radeon on my previous model. The lower graphics performance is especially noticeable if you turn the Retina setting to scaled (like 1.5x, which I prefer). It's not just that apps render a bit more slowly -- I get the sense that there's some GPU memory transfer bottleneck that's happening that causes sudden pauses in UI rendering across the entire OS. And it's something that makes the whole computer slow down with use; rebooting (or restarting Safari) speeds things up again. Typing in Slack or VSCode has noticeable lag, and switching between Spaces results in a significant pause, and the switching animation stutters something fierce. I would go so far as to say that scaled Retina is unusable on this model. I looked the model ID, and it's "MacBookPro11,4". The model that has a dedicated GPU is "MacBookPro11,5" and was discontinued in October 2016. So it looks like it's impossible to get a 2015 MBP with a dedicated graphics card right now. You can't plug in an external GPU, either; while High Sierra now supports it, it's only supported on the newer models via Thunderbolt 3. This is really frustrating. I've been using Apple laptops since 2006, and this is the first time when I can genuinely say that none of their products are good enough. I've even looked at the possibility of switching to a Linux laptop, but Linux distros are nowhere near macOS in terms of cohesiveness and UI, and while the laptop models I've looked at (ThinkPad T480S, Dell XPS 15, System76 Oryx Pro) admittedly have much better specs than Apple, none of them stand out as being particularly good. I'm now hoping that Apple will see sense this year and offer a non-Touch-Bar model with some kind of non-butterfly keyboard. But I'm not hopeful.

MrEldritch 8y ago
Honestly, your best bet might be to switch to Windows and make do with the WSL.
8y ago