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They fixed the keyboard, increased the max memory to 32GB and stuck to their guns on the touch bar - and that all seems reasonable to me. (I’m far more annoyed
by lancewiggs 8y ago
They fixed the keyboard, increased the max memory to 32GB and stuck to their guns on the touch bar - and that all seems reasonable to me.
(I’m far more annoyed by Microsoft removing ESC as the dbox cancel key for errors in Excel than the disappearance of the ESC key)
- handbanana 8y agoThey didn't really fix it though, did they?
- saagarjha 8y agoThat’s the question raised here: Apple has said that they’ve made the keyboard “quieter”. The jury’s out on whether that was codewords for fixing the issue.
- handbanana 8y agoI don’t dispute that. My point is they half-assed the fix
- saagarjha 8y agoHow do you know that? Have you had one of the new keyboards fail on you already?
- skygazer 8y agoThis [0] from this morning was interesting. Apparently AppleInsider has been monitoring a number of Genius Bar and authorized service centers for warranty repairs of 2014 thru 2017 laptops. It seems 2016 MBPs had the most keyboard issues, and the 2017 version brought the claims back down to (and below) 2014/15 levels. So, it might be reasonable to say they fixed it last year, in terms of prevalence of issues, although absurd cost to repair issue remains; combined with PR, probably explains this year's mod. [0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/13/the-2018-macbook-pro-keyboard-doesnt-seem-to-improve-reliability-and-thats-not-great https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/13/the-2018-macbook-...
- npunt 8y agoAnytime there's a new chassis launched you have to expect greater failure rates on the early parts, and the 2016 model was the first one with a new chassis, so I'm not sure the data they have tells the entire story. It's likely there were manufacturing issues that were still being worked out throughout the 2016 cycle and that there were very minor tweaks made during that year's run to improve reliability. If that were the case, the issues would be weighted toward 2016 models manufactured early in the year, and we'd only be able to know if we compared return data to build date. In my personal experience with a 2016 MBP, one of the issues with the keyboard was that when the system was under load for a significant amount of time, the resulting increase in temperature around the left side of the keyboard would cause keys to stick. The keys would unstick after temps decreased. This was an issue discussed by several people in forums. A manufacturing change to something like the application of thermal paste on the CPU/GPU might change that, without any change to the keyboard design itself.
- handbanana 8y agoI’d be interested to see a breakdown of reasons the keyboards failed for each model year. And what percentage of the pre butterfly design were because of sand/dust etc. then contrast that to the butterfly design percentage. They could have merely improved reliability in another way(s) with the butterfly design.
- greglindahl 8y agoThat would certainly be interesting -- from your other comments comments in this discussion it seemed like you already knew the answer! Guess I assumed too much.
- npunt 8y agoThat's literally the point of the article - the design was changed in a significant way to incorporate a fix to reduce dust, which is spelled out in the patent.
- handbanana 8y agoI fail to see how what they did is change “in a significant way”. It seems more of a bandaid to me. It almost signals an unwillingness to fundamentally change the keyboard design for the better
- npunt 8y agoWell one person's band-aid is another's significant fix, and only the data will tell. EDIT: Below is wrong, but keeping it for posterity: Note that the desktop Magic Keyboards that employ the butterfly mechanism do not seem to have the same key sticking issues as those on MacBooks, so it's likely they felt the fundamental design of the mechanism was fine but that it did need an additional silicone barrier for the lower-travel MacBook variant.
- bangonkeyboard 8y agoThe Magic Keyboards still use scissor switches.
- npunt 8y agoHaha I love being wrong. Thanks for the heads up bangonkeyboard, you live up to your username.
- threeseed 8y agoThe escape key never disappeared. It’s just a soft key rather than a physical one. I use it hundreds of times a day with vim and have never had problems.
- EpicEng 8y agoYou use vim all day and you don't re-map escape? Really?
- raegis 8y agocontrol-[ ain't so bad
- tartrate 8y agoOr C-c with some minor extra config to make it behave identically.
- briandear 8y agoI don’t remap escape either. I remap caps lock to control and that’s about it. In my opinion most of those screaming loudest about the soft escape key haven’t really used it for more than a minute. It’s not as big of a deal as it’s beubg made out to be. To me using a remapped escape takes more cognitive energy than using the soft escape.
- __blockcipher__ 8y agoAre you talking about the touchbar esc? Serious question, how the fuck do you use it without tactile feedback? My approach was to remap caps lock to escape as a press and ctrl as a hold, and then disable the touchbar as much as possible (whoever put unmute and siri next to each other should be taken out and shot btw, that caused me so much annoyance)
- tedivm 8y agoRemapping the "caps lock" key to ESC has worked out really well for me.
- procinct 8y agoI don’t have a touch bar but I do this too. I have it mapped to escape when pressed on its own and Ctrl when pressed with another key and that works great.
- sjwright 8y agoAnd to be fair to Apple, they make this remapping super-easy to do. No hacks, weirdness or third party tools are required.
- wudu 8y agoOnly if you want to remap to Esc. My preference is to set it as Delete. That I can not do w/o 3rd party apps.
- zumu 8y agoMe too. I really hope this catches on.
- copperx 8y agoIt makes no sense to remap a home row key to such an infrequently used key. It's much better to remap Caps Lock to Control (by the way, how do you press Control A and Control E and Control L and Control R hundreds of times a day in bash? By reaching to the far away corner located Control? That's absolute madness). Traditional UNIX keyboards had the control key in the position of where the caps lock key is now. If you remap your keyboard like that, bash and the Emacs shortcuts enabled throughout macOS will suddenly make A LOT of sense. After a few days it will seem be impossible to work in any other keyboard, which is further proof that the remapping is essential for working efficiently in a Unix environment. I would personally remap the far away control key to act like an Escape key instead. Sure, if you're a vi user, the caps lock as ESC will seem rational at first, but outside of vi, all other Unix tools work with control key combinations.
- cma 8y agoThe article mentions: > After all, Apple told The Verge that “this new third-generation keyboard wasn’t designed to solve those [dust] issues.”
- garmaine 8y agoThe patent contradicts that.
- djhworld 8y ago> increased the max memory to 32GB For the 15" model only, which costs £2,709 ($3,580)