Have you used a recent Macbook? The Macbook Pro keyboard is unique in that is is the only time in my life I have ever experienced a keyboard breaking.

I think people are a little too nostalgic when talking about Apple build quality. There's a 2011 MBP here that still works well. But recent releases... no better than the competition really.

AMEN to that. I still use my fully repairable MBP 2010 for web surfing and light tasks (with 8GB and a SSD its fine). On the Keyboard note, I've bought an expensive Eurocom (Clevo) Xeon laptop that had keyboard issues after a few years. Its not only apple that did bad with bad keyboard on expensive products (Fortunately I could repair it myself for 50$). Today apple product should ship with rossman videos and a SMD workstation if you plan to use them more than 3yrs ;)

Are you aware that the latest generation has a new keyboard? It's not the fiasco that the previous super-slim one was.

Once bitten, twice shy.

I considered that keyboard to be designed to fail. I'm not interested in gambling that another component won't fail the same way. It's easier to use products that have not demonstrated such designed failures.

The good news however is that due to this garbage tier engineering I've discovered that desktop Linux is more stable for me than post-Catalina OSX - I'd have probably never found this out otherwise.

Designed to fail is preposterous. Apple lost a ton of money due to that problem, both directly in paying for repairs, and indirectly in damage to their stock price.

It's pretty clear what happened, and it's unfortunate but banal: someone went too far with making the key mechanism as thin as possible, and all plastic to make it easier to manufacture. Ends up the plastic wasn't strong enough for the little pins in the mechanism.

That's it. Just an ordinary design mistake. Embarrassing but no conspiracy.

FWIW they've resolved it. The keyboard on this M1 MBA is perfectly fine.

> It's pretty clear what happened, and it's unfortunate but banal: someone went too far with making the key mechanism as thin as possible

I see it as a symptom of the Jony Ive ideology, untethered from realty by Jobs, poisoning Apple in the early 2010s. iOS7 flat UI, overthin devices, keyboards.

Signs are pointing that Apple is recovering from this (new aTV remote).

>Apple lost a ton of money due to that problem, both directly in paying for repairs, and indirectly in damage to their stock price.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL

I don't see any evidence that Apple's stock price was affected. Apple can ship any garbage (they shipped a keyboard they knew was defective for three years) and people will buy it because they're locked in to Apple's services, another reason they're pushing services so hard at the expense of the rest of the company.

The new keyboard is what they should have had the last few years. A refinement of the scissor switch keyboard from the glory days of the MacBook. It's great.

> Have you used a recent Macbook? The Macbook Pro keyboard is unique in that is is the only time in my life I have ever experienced a keyboard breaking.

Given that you know the keyboard has been fixed, is there a reason why you didn’t make it clear that you were talking about older machines and not current ones?

You make it sound like the current machines have the flawed keyboard, which is not true as far as I am aware.

I'm typing on a current-gen macbook, and the keyboard is fine. Butterfly keyboards were flawed, but I think it's also a bit disingenuous of the parent comment to imply that this is a reflection on overall mac build quality. Those generations of macs were bad products for several reasons, but the general build quality of those machines, and everything in Apple's line is quite high comparing to competitors

The keyboard has been fixed since 2019

Which competitor has a touchpad that’s equal to or better than apple?

I prefer the touchpad on my Surface Book 2 to the one on my Macbook Pro (2019). The one on my Macbook is comically huge, and I also am not in love with the feel/click noise compared to the Surface Book. YMMV.

The bigger the better as far as I’m concerned that’s half the reason I went with a 15” model.

Ideally there’s be no feel/click noise on an Apple trackpad. “Tap to click” is a revelation.

You know when you say stuff like "revelation" it really doesn't help your argument that you're not just fanboying out for apple?

Oh no, I much prefer the tactile response and sound of a physical click. But again, that's maybe just me.

I have both an XPS 13 Developer Edition from 2018 and two MacBooks from 2019. The touchpads on both 2019s are not good. They both have difficulty inertial scrolling and the touch rejection is far too sensitive.

Coming from lifelong Linux-land it's actually comical reflecting on how poor these things operate in day to day. The most prominent issue for me is how poorly they operate with my USB-type C dock I use for multi-monitor.

The very latest Lenovo laptops have touchpads made by Sensel. That should roll all over Apple's stuff, hardware-wise.

It’s not all about the hardware, how are Linux drivers for that thing?

No idea, it's very new so the driver side is probably flaky. This being said Lenovo is shipping it on Thinkpads and the likes, so Linux support shouldn't too far fetched.

I have a dell XPS and it's a dream. Probably the closest thing to a good trackpad. That being said, Apples keyboards, even on the MBP are below par. They don't feel like they're supposed to be put through their paces. At work they make us use Macs and iMacs and to be honest, I damn near threw the wireless keyboard in the trash but Apple will win the screen wars till Jesus comes back though.

I'm probably not the person to ask, I only use the touchpad as a last resort.

(Honestly I never even noticed that the apple touchpad was better than any other touchpad, but I understand that touchpad users will notice things I didn't.)

That is certainly one area where I think Apple has no peer.

You have to test new keyboard on M1 MBA/MBP

Test it for what exactly? All ultrabook keyboards are garbage, but they shouldn't out-right fail. "Testing" one isn't going to tell me if it will fail, it's just going to feel as crappy as the other keyboards.

If a product fails within the first 10% of expected lifespan I'm no longer interested in that product. If it fails _AND_ the manufacturer refuses to take responsibility until months of bad press and class action lawsuits then I'd have to be insane to trust them with another device.

The point is the keyboard on a 2018 Macbook when Jony Ive was allowed to push his nonsense is just not the same keyboard as on a current Macbooks.

It's a different keyboard. Different mechanism, very different feel, larger key travel, much more comfortable.

I have a 2018 i7 MBP and a 2020 M1. The keyboards feel incredibly different. On top of that the 2020 M1 has a real Escape key which is a huge upgrade for anyone in unix land/developer land, etc..

The 2019+ keyboard has had no controversy or reputation for failing.

My 2018 one does feel like it's on it's last legs FWIW. It's a work machine.. just hoping to get a refresh before it dies.

Dave2D just reviewed the new surface laptop comparing it to the new MacBook Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKN9nvXTGHE ...and he got pretty good battery life (11 hours on his own benchmark).

edit: form factor, performance, build quality.. is also up there, I just didn't mention it, because I think the battery life is the killer feature of the M1.

It is a good battery life for a PC laptop but it is still significantly behind of M1 based Macs while also having significantly lower single core benchmarks compared to M1. And the performance difference is even bigger when both laptops are on battery power.

Microsoft is almost always a generation behind with tech in surface products it's ridiculous because they look so appealing otherwise. I just feel like I'm buying last years model on launch.

That is really a problem only if you watch tech news. In reality people use computers for years, so having a 4 or 5 year old tech doesn't really matter that much.

Developers should be upgrading on 2-3 year cycles max - the leap in performance of 2 generations noticeably impacts performance and unless you're doing some really trivial stuff - performance matters.

Check out Chrome build time benchmarks between 3/4xxx and 5xxx series (or any dev tool related benchmarks). 10-20% off your iteration cycle is noticeable - and that's a single generation jump.

Increasing iteration speed is a big productivity boosts, seeing professionals with 5+ year old devices is just ridiculous to me, you spend 8+ hours on that device - investing 2000$ for an upgrade every two years is not that much to ask.

Developers may have a reason to upgrade (many don't as ssh isn't going to get any faster-er with a fancy new CPU), but they constitute the part of people that read tech news. This is a minuscule part of general population.

Compiling Chrome is a nice benchmark but in reality dev cycles are quite smaller (or you might want to optimize your toolchain).

Finally, it's quite common for developers to forget the kind of hardware their users are running on. Then they produce software that only runs well on the next gen hardware. If you develop on a beast, then at least test whatever you are producing on a 3-4 year old machine to see how it will work for the clients.

Personally I'd like if developers stayed a couple of generations behind on their computers, so the rest of us aren't forced to upgrade regularly to keep software running at a decent speed.

It means the usable life is shorter, so even if it’s fine for a while, you need to think of it as a much more expensive device per useful year.

Sadly, with the current trends I think the device will be more likely rendered by an irreparable hardware failure before it reaches end of life due to speed.

I mean that seems inevitable.

I have a 2014 retina iMac. At some point in the next few years, I’ll probably replace it with an M series iMac, and then put Linux on it. It’s hard to imagine that it will ever really reach end of life due to speed at that point.

I haven’t really felt this way with the Surface Book. The first gen was rough, but I’ve been using an SB3 for several months now and have nothing but praise for it.

Probably a Thinkpad. But depends on completely the type of work you wanna do. With anything you end up buying it's a long term investment. So whichever gets your job done and whichever has a good build quality (also something which you can easily upgrade yourself and repair easily) is the one you should buy.

Thinkpads feel well made but the screens are mostly terrible and the trackpad design is very dated.

I’m not sure why Lenovo doesn’t use better IPS panels, they can’t be saving that much margin from them.

Not a huge sample size, but the screen on my X1 Nano looks excellent. Competitive with my 2018 11” iPad Pro’s screen visually, if a bit lower PPI.

That’s one of the highest end ThinkPads though, so I guess that’s to be expected. Have heard that getting a good panel on more mainstream models like the T-series can be tough.

I love the dated trackpad design, specially when combined with the rubber mouse.

Form factor and build quality are not something AMD can control by making a better CPU architecture.

Not entirely for sure, but form factor is limited by thermal requirements (well, mostly, Apple and other OEMs have gotten into trouble by ignoring this in the past, like the first i9 macs), and that is influenced by cpu architecture.

True, but if I am considering an alternative to an M1 mac, I have to look at more than processor specs to decide if it's worth it

I had an Ideapad 5 (4800u) for a few months, it was a great little Ryzen laptop. Battery life was 7-10 hours of "real" use, CPU performance is righteous, and build quality is pretty surprising for sub-$500. Great little Linux laptop!