So there’s an article that’s been making the rounds, with the inflammatory title, The MacBook keyboard fiasco is way worse than Apple thinks.

From the article:

Apple keep insisting that only a “small number of customers have problems” with the MacBook keyboards. That’s bollocks. This is a huge issue, it’s getting worse not better, and Apple is missing the forest for the trees.

The fact is that many people simply do not contact Apple when their MacBook keyboards fail. They just live with an S key that stutters or a spacebar that intermittently gives double. Or they just start using an external keyboard. Apple never sees these cases, so it never counts in their statistics.

I struggled with whether to post this article and, if I did, finding the right take. My issue with the article was the small sample size.

But, I’ve experienced exactly what this article focused on: The “r” key on the very MacBook Pro on which I’m typing this occasionally refuses to work. But it happens so rarely, and responds to my hammering the key back into normalcy, that I just live with it.

Enter John Gruber. From the linked post:

Hansson used the headline “The MacBook Keyboard Fiasco Is Way Worse Than Apple Thinks”, but I suspect it’d be more accurate to say that it’s way worse than Apple admits. They don’t need to look at the number of support incidents from customers. Almost everyone at Apple uses MacBooks of some sort. They know from their own use of the product how problematic reliability is.

And there’s the crux. Apple eats their own dog food, as the expression goes. Numbers being what they are, they must be acutely aware of this problem.

So what’s next? Will we see a MacBook event later this year with a new keyboard? One based on an entirely new (or old and reliable) keyboard design? Time will tell.