iBook and TiBook Keyboards suck

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Is it just me or do the iBook and TiBook keyboards suck? I owned an iBook 500Mhz dual usb and I had to replace my keyboard 4 times before the keys didn't fall off or didn't work at all. Does apple have trouble making keyboards that work right? Has anyone else encountered this problem? I also say the TiBook keyboards suck too because the one that I saw in display had missing keys as well. Not as many as the iBook display though. I can understand if people abuse these keyboards by pressing hard on the keys, but I never pressed hard on my keys, yet they popped off. MWNY needs to introduce new reliable keyboards for laptops!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    applenutapplenut Posts: 5,768member
    people rip the ****ing keys off in the store. that's why. not because they suck. my keys and the keys of thousands of others are intact. but the keyboard sucks.



    right
  • Reply 2 of 8
    macasaurusmacasaurus Posts: 243member
    yes, but the keys on my laptop also fell off. I never tried to rip them off or pound on them.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    murbotmurbot Posts: 5,262member
    My first and only problem with a keyboard was with my first Ti Book. The "d" key popped off - while I was filling out the registration on it!!



    They told me since it was so new, it had to be sent in to have the keyboard replaced! Man was I pissed....hadn't even registered the damn thing and it was broke. A little well placed Superglue and it was fine though.



    I've had several other laptops though, and never had another problem. Everyone gets a dud now and then. Overall I think they're pretty decent keyboards.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    daverdaver Posts: 496member
    I prefer my iBook 500's keyboard to the Pro Keyboard, although it's not quite as nice for gaming. (But hey, this is an iBook we're talking about...)



    The only problem I've had was a broken tab key last month, which was fixed under warranty.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    junkyard dawgjunkyard dawg Posts: 2,801member
    I heard the "W" keys keep falling off on lots of Apple laptops.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    emaneman Posts: 7,204member
    During the first week I had my iBook one of the keys came off. I got a replacement keyboard and it's been fine. Some PC laptop keyboards seem better though, but the iBook's an Ti's aren't that bad.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    i must have had some bad luck to have had 3 straight bad replacement keyboards!
  • Reply 8 of 8
    That's no mystery, and it's barely luck. That's the batch of keyboards they had available. Apple doesn't make bad products, and some of its parts are outsourced so when they fail it is hardly Apple's fault, but mainly it just takes a while to figure out what's happening.



    Say one bad set of keyboards goes out. After a few weeks, lots of people have sent them back, but Apple repairs all sorts of products, not just the most recent ones. In fact, most of the day a repair worker is probably dealing with old equipment. So the keyboards are replaced and the computers sent back, and none of the repair crew notice that the keyboards are coming back terribly often. I'll bet notebook keyboards come back to all manufacturers quite often because people knock them off tables and such. It's hard for an individual to figure out the numbers and identify that a batch of notebooks with bad keyboards went out.



    It isn't until many of these ones fail too that people start griping about it and Apple considers the possibility that a whole batch of keyboards is bad. It takes a significant time for them to fail, because most people mouse a whole lot more than they type. Most people can't type 30 WPM, and most e-mail is very short indeed.



    So once a large group of consumers report a second failure, Apple starts trying to find the boxes that have bad keyboards, and that takes some time. Meanwhile, you are one of the faster or more industrious typers, even if only a little, and yours breaks before the others. You can easily get it replaced a few times before the problem is identified, counted, and the defective boxes are found. The whole process only takes a month or two, sometimes three, which is very fast for a large organization with many other things to do, but seems very slow to a consumer.



    That's why almost every manufacturer of anything at all offers a one-year warranty. Bad parts just happen to anyone who makes anything, because some dolt didn't tighten a door enough or whatever. Sometimes, it's true, a design doesn't work for some reason the engineers couldn't predict (the original iBooks had handles that exploded in cold weather) or because someone got lazy (the original AirPorts didn't have any ventilation slits and could be counted on to fail after thirteen months). You have to judge the company on what they'll do to make it right.
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