photoeditor

Apple needed to be hit with this. The keyboard on the 2015 and '16 MacBooks and on the 2016 MacBook Pro is appalling, weird feedback, tons of errors at least for me and a version of the butterfly mechanism that's now been discontinued. I've heard they're actually using the 2017 part to fix '16 Pros with failed keyboards. Even the 2017 one, I think, is still prone to jams from dirt ingress and I'm hedging my bets with one of those silicone keyboard covers. But at least it's a heck of a lot faster and more accurate to type on than the previous year.

It doesn't surprise me about the "B" key vulnerability; being where it is, it's the most prone to dirt ingress from around the spacebar, I would think. The way I type I suspect the "N" key might also be vulnerable.

To all those complaining about lawsuits....it's how regulation is done in the US. Either you have a system where you can enforce standards through discovery and litigation like in the US, or you have a system like France where you enforce them with lots of government inspectors and rules, or you have anarchy where everyone's free to con and rip each other off all the time as opposed to having to weigh whether they'll get caught.

eideard said:

Don't even care to know what G-suite is; but, I do have 2-step authentication turned on. Got the password message - got a text msg code for authentication - that's all folks! It's working.

An example of G-suite is when Google is the contracted software provider for email and G-apps for an enterprise, say a university or large corporation. I've been asked to authenticate each of my accounts, my G-suite and both my personal accounts, through Safari since the update.....though thankfully not more than once and let's hope it stays that way. For reference I already have two-factor authentication activated.

randominternetperson said:

Ridiculous.  What determines whether something is law suit worthy?  If a company makes a product that isn't durable and treats its customers poorly, the market will "reward" that company with poor future sales.  That's how the system to works.  Unless someone gets hurt or the company reneges on warranty obligations, why should I court get involved?

Yeah, like the market's really free to do that on a whim, with thousands in stranded costs per user around a particular software and hardware platform.

If a company screws up like this, it should go beyond the basic warranty. The real kicker for me is that Apple started using the 2017 part to repair broken keyboards on the 2016 model in the MacBook Pro. That tells me the 2016 keyboard is a recall situation, a fundamentally flawed part, and should be treated as such. By all means let them do a soft recall -- we don't want every Apple Store "idiot bar" gridlocked for a month. But it should be a recall. And maybe if they'd treated it as such before now there wouldn't be a lawsuit. Shades here of the 2011 AMD solder failure in 15-inch MacBook Pros, where Apple stonewalling it for years left many people without resolution of the problem whatsoever.

We should be deranged about Trump....he and what he represents is a disaster

At the same time, looking at what the Chinese actually do, we've got to understand that there's a very strong moral case (even if the economic case seems suspect) in favor of tariffs against Chinese goods. In no way is it acceptable in the US to have workers working as indentured servants, in corporate dormitories, ready to be woken at 2am, not for a fire call or some other actual emergency, but simply to produce more widgets at the beck and call of an executive. This has given China an enormous advantage; it has led to the collapse of entire supply chains in the US. And we need a national discussion about whether countries where this kind of thing is acceptable should have to pay a higher price to enter the US market. The implication of not dealing with this is that in order to fulfill basic economic needs we'd have to become as a country much more like China, no democracy, lots of exploitation, much less freedom, much more indebtedness to those with money and power.

The sad part is Trump has not been at all smart about tariffs. Where they should have been applied to finished goods, they have instead been applied to raw materials, and that's had the practical effect of knocking down even more supply chains in the US and shifting even more production overseas, because US manufacturers need access to those raw materials if they are to assemble and build complicated components and especially finished goods here. Basically, when Trump hears a complaint from some friend of his that's in areas in which he's invested, so basically real estate, or raw materials industries like wood-pulp or mining, that's all he hears, and those account for a very small part of the economy. People that actually account for most of this country's economy, through manufacturing and services, simply do not have the ear of this president because he always believes he knows best and he does not bother to find out about anything he hasn't personally experienced.

tmay said:

I get why you hate Trump, but what I can't comprehend is how you became such an apologist for the the Chinese Government. Seriously, are you not up on current events?

It's damned rare to find Trump opponents who are apologists for the Chinese government. In reality Trump has done more to benefit China at US expense than any US president, even more so that Clinton who prematurely let them into the WTO. Killing the TPP was a disaster because it prevented the formation of a new 'inner club" of nations around the United States that would partly reverse the WTO mistake; the frolicking with North Korea in practice plays right into Chinese hands, and so does the trade war which the Trump administration has foolishly fought out mostly over raw materials rather than finished goods, playing right to China's strength. Even if you accept that a trade war is good policy -- which it rarely is for the country that's in a trade deficit as opposed to surplus, and therefore rarely good for a country like the US -- this one still flunks because it couldn't have been designed better for China by the Chinese themselves.

I trust the subtext of this release is that it's really there to fix all the bugs in Ventura and reverse some of the cruft of the past 20 years. Still the improved password management and conferencing features are nice.

I wonder if the new widgets will be seamless across platforms (i.e. with Watch and I-Devices)