Mike Wuerthele, Apple Insider:

Following anecdotal reports of a keyboard more prone to failure than in previous years, AppleInsider has collected service data for the first year of release of the 2014, 2015, and 2016 MacBook Pros, with an additional slightly shorter data set for the 2017 model year given that it hasn’t been available for a year yet.

Not including any Touch Bar failures, the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard is failing twice as often in the first year of use as the 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro models, and the 2017 is better, but not by a lot.

First things first, this is some nice, boots-on-the-ground reporting. The numbers are relatively small, but seems a good, if not precise, indicator of the problem.

Apple has a second-generation MacBook Pro keyboard. It is in the 2017 MacBook Pro, and repaired 2016 models. The repair percentages on those are up from the 2014 and 2015 keyboards as well, but not nearly as much as the 2016.

Note that all Apple Store MacBook Pro stock has the new second-generation butterfly keyboard. You can’t walk into an Apple Store and walk out with the old MacBook Pro keyboard. So the data that matters going forward is the repair data on machines with that new keyboard.

I’d like to see a bigger survey of machines with that new keyboard, to get a surer sense of the success Apple has had in solving the problem. The sense I get in talking with people at my local Apple Store is that the new keyboard design made a world of difference in terms of reliability. This just words? Is the dust problem still there?

One thing that I know is true: There’s no way for an average buyer to take their machine apart and swap out the keyboard if they do encounter this problem. As Mike says, it’s not an easy repair, requiring complete disassembly of the machine.