It’s amazing how much of a dumpster fire the butterfly keyboard was, but perhaps more bewilderingly how long they persisted with it. That keyboard might well have done more than any other product design decision in the last decade to push people away from the Mac platform.

If the M1 MBA (or early 2020 Intel MBA) didn't exist, when my 2013 MBP started dying last month I would have dropped Apple for an Ubuntu XPS.

I don't understand how a company of that size kept up a blunder of that magnitude for half a decade, but a half-broken keyboard with an entire missing row of keys was just a nonstarter.

I think it did, and the touch bar was a close second. Thankfully, whoever was in charge of those decisions seems to have lost decision-making power and Apple has walked back both.

> whoever was in charge of those decisions seems to have lost decision-making power

I guess we're both speculating here, but even if the same people were in charge, I think they breathed a sigh of relief when they realized that the personal computing segment had spiced up again. From about 2014 to 2019, Mac revenue basically plateaued in line with the entire laptop market. People were crazy about phones but laptops had hit a wall.

When you have to sell laptops to people whose yesteryear laptops do everything they need, you start adding random bullshit to the product because you have to capture the market's attention somehow. I think this is how we ended up with the touch bar. It's a step backward, but it's flashy and made the product look fresh(er) despite the form factor being identical to what they were selling in 2013.

the touch bar still ships with every current-gen MBP though; the Air never had one

It's going away though

That really confused me until I discovered that Macs had something called a "butterfly keyboard" as well. At first I thought you switched to Thinkpads in the mid 90s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_701