But not on purpose. In this case, after a sustained engineering effort, Apple finally and reluctantly concluded that they could not build this particular product up to their standard, so they decided to just not build it at all, instead.

We should applaud that. That's how things should work.

>But not on purpose.

You could argue that after three models with butterfly keyboards, it's pretty purposeful. It's not like no one pointed it out to them.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. You could excuse the first model using the butterfly keyboard as them not knowing the issues, but multiple revisions have been released since and the keyboard was untouched. That can't not be deliberate.

I mean, they clearly did try to fix it, as evidenced by the membrane they added to the newest revision. The fact that this didn’t actually resolve the issue is unrelated.

Ugh they should really get rid of that keyboard

I had a 2016 MacBook Pro which absolutely had a lot of issues with the butterfly keyboard. It was clearly a bad product. But they definitely fixed the issues with the 2018 one.

There definitely isn't the same level of complains on the internet about it.

There are less complaints about 2018 model. They didn't really fix it.

If my (non-Apple) laptop is anything to go by, the keyboards with that crappy low-rise design have average life expectancy of one year. The 2018 modification will not get clogged with dust until the end of 2019, at which point people will be complaining about it too.

This is ignoring the fact that very few people have issues with these keyboards overall.

How many people are very few people?

There's 35,000 signatures on a petition to recall the keyboards. There's two class-action lawsuits. There's how many different online writings about the issue?

You can get signatures and file suits for almost anything, that's pretty meaningless. If it wasn't an insignificant percentage, they would've done something about it.

So your basis for the "very few people" is Apple's inaction?

They're really the only entity who knows how widespread this is, and is financially incentivized to address it. Additionally, my employer has probably 30,000 of these keyboards in service and it's not a significant issue.

They're also financially incentivised to downplay the issue considering the class-action lawsuits alleging that they were selling defective keyboards.

I don't think Apple is too concerned about class action lawsuits over keyboards... They'll settle and pay a little cash, another entirely insignificant number.

>There were a lot of "online writings" about WMD in Iraq, too.

...what?

> There were a lot of "online writings" about WMD in Iraq, too.

Not sure if that's true or not, but wouldn't a lot of people have complained about that too, had they malfunctioned, or even been used, a la Macbooks?

My 2018 MacBook Pro works great. No issues with the hardware at all and I love the TouchBar.

What exactly is wrong with them ?

You're one of the lucky ones; my 2018 laptop has unreliable "o" , "s", "h", "j", "k", and "e" keys (can you tell I'm a heavy vim user?), and the black plastic around the "K" glyph has started to wear away.

For me it's endless stuttering with spacebar, e, and r for some reason.

The keyboards. My 2016 MacBook Pro has had issues with several of the keys.

Apple has extended the warranty on the keyboard to four years, but it's not like they will actually give you a working keyboard design, but rather switch out the keyboard for the same design.

They're also being sued for the keyboard issues.

I know that they had issues with the 2016 and 2017 models. I owned one.

But those issues were fixed in the 2018 one. Which is why they haven't needed to extend the warranty at all.

Sadly people are reporting issues with the 2018 versions as well. For example, this article hilariously was written without the 'r' and 'e' keys to showcase what's been happening recently: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...

Not really.

Joanna Stern's article was about her 2018 MacBook Air's keyboard, which has the same membrane as the 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard.

> "I know that they had issues with the 2016 and 2017 models."

So it's no longer your belief that the 2017 model was significantly better than the 2016 version? Or was it significantly better, but still shit? In one or two years will the 2018 version in turn be considered significantly better but still shit?

I have both a 2016 and 2017 one. I did not notice any difference in keyboard quality and they both failed after about a year. Keys either stopped picking up input, or would repeat. On one my space bar repeated a lot and just felt wrong.

I won’t be touching the 2018 one until I see reports of people that have had them for over a year. It sounds like based on the new WSJ reporting, the 2018 has problems too though.

I don’t believe Apple even ever officially admitted the membrane design in the 2018 model was to keep dust out and improve reliability. Pretty sure the official reason was noise reduction.