4 ms·

Good lord, this keyboard design was horrendous. Everyone at the time tried to blame cruft and dust getting under the keys; the reality is that even the most met

Good lord, this keyboard design was horrendous. Everyone at the time tried to blame cruft and dust getting under the keys; the reality is that even the most meticulously clean users found keys double-activating after a few months of normal use. I worked in IT and my employer bought thousands of these models, and sure enough after maybe 6 months employees were coming to us desperate for a replacement... the 'guidance' we had to fix these things at the time was to blow compressed air 'gently' under the keys to clear any debris (which of course didn't help much, if at all). The newer M1 models don't really have this problem because they have the older "pre-butterfly" (think 2013 era) keys.

deleted 4y ago
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BuckyBeaver 4y ago
Exactly. Reports avidly regurgitate this bogus excuse, but the fact is that this keyboard was shit from day one. More Jony Ive trash that degraded Apple's products and insulted customers for FIVE YEARS... on top of the embarrassing emoji bar that they forced on users ("pro" users, no less) the whole time. And the users who paid $4K for a top-of-the line laptop with a basically unusable keyboard get zilch. I had to put one of Apple's circa-2010 Bluetooth keyboards ON TOP OF my MBP keyboard to get work done. The keyboard was so shitty that the Wall Street Journal mocked it with an entire article published without fixing any of the errors that it introduced. Then they have buttons on the page that you can activate to eradicate the defects, one kind at a time: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-macbook-keyboard-problem/ https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...
- tpmoney 4y ago
  >on top of the embarrassing emoji bar that they forced on users ("pro" users, no less) the whole time. The touchbar was alright. Honestly I miss it on my newer laptop, largely because in apps that made use of it, it was a productive tool. Does your debugger use F8, F7 or F6 to "Step Over"? Which one is "Step Into"? With the touch bar, the icons were literally right there on the keyboard. Ideally I would have loved for the F-key row to have oled backed physical keys that could change their labels on the fly, or barring that, an F-key row with a touch bar above it, but overall it was a perfectly fine thing.
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    If you program regularly, I think you're going to know which keys are "step over/into/out." I've been using the Visual C++ debugging F-keys for almost 30 years, and rely on physical keys for finding them without looking down at my keyboard. The touchbar was further gimped by Apple's baffling omission of at least one key that they petulantly refuse to put on their laptops: Delete. I mean real Delete, not Apple's Backspace key that they've mislabeled "delete." It's bad enough that they didn't have this key to begin with. It's even worse that when the Eject key became obsolete, they didn't make that Delete. But worst of all was having a totally software-controlled touchbar but inexplicably leaving "Delete" out of the buttons you could add to it. At this point, it's just another example of Apple's infantile refusal to admit that they're wrong.
    - tpmoney 4y ago
      I program regularly, what I don’t do is use all the various tools in my IDE regularly, including the debugger. The context aware keys are helpful there. Especially if you use multiple IDEs in different contexts. As for delete, your mileage may vary but I find fn-backspace to not be particularly annoying when I need it, especially since I’m already using fn-arrow keys for page up, page down, home and end. But I also don’t use two many applications that dedicate specific functionality to the delete key (IDEs being the exception, but since all that functionality is gated behind modifiers anyway, adding fn is effectively free.
kjkjadksj 4y ago
Even if it did get debris thats no excuse. I get debris and crap all the time in the 2012 macbook, just takes a second to blow out versus ruining the laptop.
potamic 4y ago
The failures were really a blessing in disguise for Apple. Without them they would have most certainly continued to push forward the butterfly, given how they always know better than their users.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

Exactly. Reports avidly regurgitate this bogus excuse, but the fact is that this keyboard was shit from day one. More Jony Ive trash that degraded Apple's products and insulted customers for FIVE YEARS... on top of the embarrassing emoji bar that they forced on users ("pro" users, no less) the whole time. And the users who paid $4K for a top-of-the line laptop with a basically unusable keyboard get zilch. I had to put one of Apple's circa-2010 Bluetooth keyboards ON TOP OF my MBP keyboard to get work done. The keyboard was so shitty that the Wall Street Journal mocked it with an entire article published without fixing any of the errors that it introduced. Then they have buttons on the page that you can activate to eradicate the defects, one kind at a time: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-macbook-keyboard-problem/ https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...

tpmoney 4y ago
>on top of the embarrassing emoji bar that they forced on users ("pro" users, no less) the whole time. The touchbar was alright. Honestly I miss it on my newer laptop, largely because in apps that made use of it, it was a productive tool. Does your debugger use F8, F7 or F6 to "Step Over"? Which one is "Step Into"? With the touch bar, the icons were literally right there on the keyboard. Ideally I would have loved for the F-key row to have oled backed physical keys that could change their labels on the fly, or barring that, an F-key row with a touch bar above it, but overall it was a perfectly fine thing.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  If you program regularly, I think you're going to know which keys are "step over/into/out." I've been using the Visual C++ debugging F-keys for almost 30 years, and rely on physical keys for finding them without looking down at my keyboard. The touchbar was further gimped by Apple's baffling omission of at least one key that they petulantly refuse to put on their laptops: Delete. I mean real Delete, not Apple's Backspace key that they've mislabeled "delete." It's bad enough that they didn't have this key to begin with. It's even worse that when the Eject key became obsolete, they didn't make that Delete. But worst of all was having a totally software-controlled touchbar but inexplicably leaving "Delete" out of the buttons you could add to it. At this point, it's just another example of Apple's infantile refusal to admit that they're wrong.
  - tpmoney 4y ago
    I program regularly, what I don’t do is use all the various tools in my IDE regularly, including the debugger. The context aware keys are helpful there. Especially if you use multiple IDEs in different contexts. As for delete, your mileage may vary but I find fn-backspace to not be particularly annoying when I need it, especially since I’m already using fn-arrow keys for page up, page down, home and end. But I also don’t use two many applications that dedicate specific functionality to the delete key (IDEs being the exception, but since all that functionality is gated behind modifiers anyway, adding fn is effectively free.

kjkjadksj 4y ago

Even if it did get debris thats no excuse. I get debris and crap all the time in the 2012 macbook, just takes a second to blow out versus ruining the laptop.

potamic 4y ago

The failures were really a blessing in disguise for Apple. Without them they would have most certainly continued to push forward the butterfly, given how they always know better than their users.