At first blush, this might seem like a typical “Apple is doomed” kind of article. There certainly is a bit of that slant.
But this piece goes a lot deeper than that. There is a lot of detail on the construction of the MacBook butterfly keyboard, the difference between the 1.0 and 2.0 revs, and on exactly why these mechanisms fail when they do fail. With pictures.
A few tidbits, from a much longer story:
The basic flaw is that these ultra-thin keys are easily paralyzed by particulate matter. Dust can block the keycap from pressing the switch, or disable the return mechanism. I’ll show you how in a minute.
And:
So you can’t switch key caps. And it gets worse. The keyboard itself can’t simply be swapped out. You can’t even swap out the upper case containing the keyboard on its own. You also have to replace the glued-in battery, trackpad, and speakers at the same time. For Apple’s service team, the entire upper half of the laptop is a single component. That’s why Apple has been charging through the nose and taking forever on these repairs. And that’s why it’s such a big deal—for customers and for shareholders—that Apple is extending the warranty. It’s a damned expensive way to dust a laptop.
And:
Thin may be in, but it has tradeoffs. Ask any Touch Bar owner if they would trade a tenth of a millimeter for a more reliable keyboard. No one who has followed this Apple support document instructing them to shake their laptop at a 75 degree angle and spray their keyboard with air in a precise zig-zag pattern will quibble over a slightly thicker design.
This is design anorexia: making a product slimmer and slimmer at the cost of usefulness, functionality, serviceability, and the environment.
I hope Apple’s next MacBook and MacBook Pro releases learn a lesson from all this. I hope that the next rev of Apple’s laptops are more easily repaired. I just replaced a fan in an old MacBook Air. It cost me $8 for a new fan and took about 10 minutes to do.
This is better on all sorts of levels. I saved money buying an Apple product, I didn’t lose my laptop for a week, and I was able to keep my laptop alive. I realize that last bit goes against a corporate goal of pushing me to buy, buy, buy, but Apple is better than that. They care about the environment, at the cost of maximizing shareholder value. To me, this is another example of that same tradeoff.
Bottom line, I anxiously await the next generation of MacBooks. I want to believe.
It’s worth noting that Apple has launched things to derision and scorn from even its most loyal of customers, and most of the time people come around and realize it’s an improvement. The fact that the reception to the new keyboards started bad and only managed to get WORSE is really something.
What I keep coming back to is that this generation of MBPs was Apple thinking “oh these people that think we don’t care about the Mac, they’re really gonna be blown away with this.” But they put a ton of time, effort, and money into features that weren’t really a net improvement over the old machines, and often times were notably worse. Apple’s problem isn’t that they don’t care about the Mac, but that they don’t seem to really understand it anymore. That, or they’re afraid to release something that’s “just a laptop.”
“The new notebook was universally applauded by tech pundits, with one notable exception: my team at iFixit. Unlike the rest of the tech media…”
Wiens is *relentless* in his back patting/slamming others for their inability to see things the way he does. Really does himself and his company a disservice.
The problem with this assessment is that the author blames the thinning of the computer for the poor keyboard. The MacBook Air has been out since 2010 in an even thinner design and has a fully functioning keyboard that is not brought to its knees by a grain of sand. I realize that the MBA keyboard takes up a little more space and that in order to keep the MBP the same thickness they would have to give up some battery, but the point is, you can have both thin and a good keyboard. Making it thicker is not the only solution. Also, I have a feeling that if they worked at it, they could come up with a functioning keyboard either as thin or close to the thinness of the current MBP keyboard. This is just a bad design.
The headline negates any positives that post might have. Yes, Apple will FAIL and is DOOMED because of this. DOOOOOMMEDD….
The reason people spew this crap is to get views. Don’t reward them.
Or, frankly, make it 2mm thicker. I wouldn’t notice that (I have a 2016 MBP) and it might solve this.
Yeah, this is the one thing that mars the article. There’s some excellent analysis in here, but it’s unfortunately weighed down by the rest, which is opinion (a valid one, mind you, but not the only one). It’d be better to focus on the engineering merits.
How is apple better than buy, buy, buy? I don’t see it. They’ve purposefully made their devices difficult to repair, not just because of this thickness anorexia, but because it makes them a lot more money. They cherry pick their passion – they certainly passionate about the environment – but they’re a user hostile company by choice.
He has an extremely narrow scope by which he judges hardware: repairability. He then expects everyone else to care about repairability above all else like him. It’s a really biased, unrealistic, and more than a little deranged perspective.
It makes them a lot more money to make devices that break, discouraging users from buying more Apple products and costs Apple money to repair under warranty?
When you look at Apple’s designs it’s clear they try to minimize failures and limit the companies liability for user repair failures (i.e. people requiring Apple service because they botched a repair themselves). Solidly gluing everything together and avoiding removable components helps improve overall reliability.
This really isn’t a new thing for Apple. For example, this is essentially the process to replace the CMOS battery in a Powerbook 540C:
“Remove everything from the computer that isn’t a CMOS battery”
This. My 2013 13″ MBA is still my Platonic Ideal of a Laptop. Light, long lived, rugged and functional.
Exactly. I have both a 2012 13″ MBA and a 2015 13″ MBP. I love both of those computers so much! I would be sick if I owned one of these models that I knew after 4 years could fail me in a way that would make it economically a bad idea to repair.
I’ll never forget installing a modem in my PowerBook Duo 230. It required the same process. The entire computer was laid bare on my table to install that modem, and then carefully put back together. The keyboard however, was dead simple to replace on that model, and I had to do it once.
Wake up to the obvious, folks.
Since the passing of Steve Jobs, Apple is being taken over by bean-counters. Apple’s main concern now is profits, profits, profits!
Reliability reduces profits. MacBooks were lasting longer than ever, so Apple addressed the issue by drastically lowering reliability. Not just keyboards, but by jettisoning MagSafe and combining ports into that single connection, making it more prone to failure than ever before.
Mark my words: Yesterday’s reliable MacBooks are soon to be ancient history!!!
Perhaps you should switch to a $299 Chromebook.
Don’t be a jerk. Go troll somewhere else.
WINDOWS IS THE WORST!!!
Bye-bye.
Knock it off with the name calling.
No one called anyone a name, so shut up and mind your own business.
LMAO Seriously?
Reading iFixit can be akin to getting one’s information from a sysadmin who worships Linus Torvalds and believes nothing Apple has ever done is worth praising in any way.
There’s genuine information to be had from the guy, but you have to know which questions to ask, and when to tune out the part of the answer that goes off into the partisan weeds.
I don’t talk to that guy any more.
ridiculous. This is barely worth replying to but a) customer satisfaction figures are very high for almost all Apple products, b) it’s counter productive to be user hostile when your business depends on repeat purchasers and word of mouth and finally c) it’s insulting to imply that Apple is user-hostile thus that people who do buy Apple products must be some kind of mindless cult.
Improve your critical faculties or troll elsewhere