henrybay

rogifan_new said:

MplsP said:

GeorgeBMac said:

stevenoz said:

I echo Henrybay... Apple should replace the butterfly keyboard ASAP and banish them completely from the line!

I know I wouldn't buy a 'butterfly' Mac or keyboard. And I'm an 'Apple Guy.'

And let's make the MBP a bit thicker, now that Jony is history, to allow for some more ports so I don't have to carry dongles. I don't mind a solid piece of hardware for my hard-earned money.

  I agree.

There is no way I would buy a butterfly keyboard laptop -- the keys suck then they fail.  And I can buy a whole new Windows laptop for the cost of repairing the stupid thing.

And I also agree with a thicker laptop -- well, sort of.   I wouldn't recommend making all existing MacBooks thicker.  Rather I would recommend that Apple put out a new series of "full function" laptops with high end keyboards (with actual travel!), full ports and a 15"-17" screen -- basically a workstation that can travel when/if needed.   Think about it:  The only thing unique about any MacBook is the OS and Apple's ecosystem -- everything else is essentially off-the-shelf hardware and easily designed and produced.  
... Thin and light are nice and are needed by some, but they also introduce inherent limitations.

If adding an additional mm to the MBP meant it had a more reliable keyboard (or even one that could be separately replaced) I'd be all for it. Doing so wouldn't necessarily add significantly to the weight but would improve the repairability and longevity. Like I said above, I suspect Apple didn't switch to the butterfly mechanism because it was better, rather because it was thinner and they could cut a mm off the thickness (or add that much. more battery, since what people care about is battery life.) That would explain the claims that the butterfly keyboard is more expensive, too. Unfortunately, what we ended up with was a premium laptop with a critical component that is subpar and impossible to replace without doing major surgery on the device.

John Gruber claims there were leaks from inside the company that Ive was responsible for the keyboard. Even if he pushed for it the fact the the company shipped it (either believing it was good enough to ship or not doing proper testing to find out there were problems) is a failure leadership up and down the line.  Dan Riccio runs Mac engineering. Jeff Williams runs operations. One would assume employees in their orgs were involved in engineering and manufacturing this keyboard. Did they just not do enough QA testing? I  have a hard time believing anyone (including Ive) would intentionally sign off on a keyboard they knew was defective. So the only conclusion I can come to is the testing they did wasn’t good enough and didn’t catch problems. And that blame can be laid at the feet of many executives, including Tim Cook. As CEO the buck stops with him.