> Given that the yields are said to be worse for the “butterfly” keys than normal scissor keys, and that they’re more expensive to make, one can only think that either Apple is stubborn as hell at the executive level, or so tightly constrained by its design goals that it can’t figure out a way to reintroduce scissor-switch keys because that would mean designing an entirely new body and case for the whole line.

I think the author underestimates large scale production pipelines, where you may be many years out (due to things like design, test, assembly creation, assembly optimization, backchannel buildup, etc). Most products are several years in development before they are released.