INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Yes I am very late to this
But I am also very annoyed so I am adding my voice to the now sustained chorus of complaints about Apple redesigned Mac keyboard: How very
This is the keyboard that Apple &completely redesigned& in 2015, in its quest for size zero hardware, switching from a scissor mechanism
for the keys to what it described then as the &new Apple-designed butterfly mechanism& —touting this as 40% thinner and 4x more
stable.
Reader, there is nothing remotely beautiful and butterfly-esque about the experience of depressing these keys
Scattershot staccato clattering, as your fingers are simultaneously sucked in and involuntarily hammer out a grapeshot of key strikes, is
It brutalist and unforgiving
Most egregiously it not reliably functional.
The redesigned mechanism has resulted in keys that not only feel different when pressed vs the
prior MacBook keyboard — which was more spongey for sure but that meant keys were at reduced risk of generating accidental strikes vs
their barely-there trigger-sensitive replacements (which feel like they have a 40% smaller margin for keystrike error) — but have also
turned out to be fail prone, asparticles of dust can find their way in between the keys, as dust is wont to do, and mess with the smooth
functioning of key presses — requiring an official Apple repair.
Yes, just a bit of dust! Move over ‘the princess and the pea&: Apple
and the dust mote is here! ‘Just use it in a vacuum& shouldn''t be an acceptable usability requirement for a very expensive laptop.
Apple
has also had to make these keyboards quieter
Because, as I say, the act of using the keyboard results in audible clackclackery
It like mobile phone keyclicks suddenly got dizzingly back in fashion
(Or, well, Apple designers got to overindulge their blue-sky thinking around the idea that ‘in space no one can hear you type&.)
Several
colleagues have garnered dagger glances and been told to dial it down at conferences on account of all the key clattering as they worked
Yet a keyboard is made for working
Instead, Apple has made a keyboard for making audible typos
It shockingly bad.
As design snafus go, this is up there with antenna-gate
Except actually it much worst
You can''t not ‘hold it in that way&
You can''t press keys on a keyboard radically differently
I guess you could type really slowly to try to avoid making all these high speed typos
But that would have an obvious impact on your ability to work by slowing down your ability to write
So, again, an abject mess.
I&ve only had this Oath-issued 2017 MacBook Pro (in long-held-off exchange for my trusty MacBook Air, whose
admittedly grimy and paint-worn keys were nonetheless 100% functional after years of writerly service) for about a month but the keys appear
to have a will of their own, whipping themselves into a possessive frenzy almost every time they&re pressed, and spewing out all manner of
odd typos, mis-strikes and mistakes.
This demonic keyboard has summoned Siri unasked
(Thanks stupidly pointless Touch Bar!) It has also somehow nearly delivered an ‘I&m not interested& auto-response to a stranger who wrote
me at length on LinkedIn to thoughtfully thank me for an earlier article
(Fortunately I didn''t have auto-send enabled so I could catch that unintended slapdown in the act before it was delivered
No thanks to the technologies involved.)
At the same time Caps Lock routinely fails to engage when pressed, as if it practising for when
It equally countlessly fails to disengage when re-pressed
‘Craps Out Lock& more like
I fear it beset by dust motes already
Which is hard to avoid because, y&know, everything in the world is made of dust.
The keyboard also frustrates because of the jarring
juxtaposition of having individual keys that depress too willingly, seeming to suck the typos from your fingers as letters get snatched out
of sequence (and even whole words coaxed out of line), coupled with a backspace key that refuses to perform quickly enough (I&ve had to
crank it right up to the very fastest setting) so it can''t gobble up the multiple erroneous strikes quickly enough to edit out all the BS
the keyboard is continually spewing.
The result A laptop that lightning quick at creating a typo-ridden mess, and slow as hell to clean it
A horrible mess that makes a mockery of the Apple catchphrase of yore (‘it just works&) by actively degrading the productivity of writing
— interrupting your work with pointless sound and an alphabetic soup of fury.
The redesigned keyboard has been denounced by Apple
loyalists such as John Gruber — who in April called it &one of the biggest design screwups in Apple history&.
He precision-hammered his
point home with this second economical sentence: &Everyone who buys a MacBook depends upon the keyboard and this keyboard is
undependable.
Though it was Casey Johnson, writing for The Outline, who raised the profile of the problem last year, kicking up a major
stink over her MacBook keys acting up (or dead) after a brush with invisible dust.
Since then keyboard-related problems have garnered Apple
at least one class action lawsuit.
Meanwhile, the company has responded to this hardware headache of its own design like the proverbial
thief in the night, quietly fiddling with the internals when no one was looking
Most notably it slotted in a repair earlier this year, when it added a sort of silicon gum shield to wrap the offending butterfly mechanism,
which is presumably supposed to prevent dust from wreaking its terribly quotidian havoc
(Though it no use to me, right here, right now, with my corporate provisioned 2017 MBP.)
We know this thanks to the excellent work done by
iFixit this summer, when it took apart one of Apple redesigned redesigned keyboards and found a thin rubberized film had been added under
(Looking at this translucent addition, I am reminded of Alien designer HR Giger biomechanical concoctions
And of Ash robotic hard-on for poking around inside the disemboweled facehugger
But I digress.)
Shamelessly Apple tried to sell this tweak to journalists as solely a fix for those noisy key clicks
iFixit was not at all convinced.
This flexible enclosure is quite obviously an ingress-proofing measure to cover up the mechanism from the
daily onslaught of microscopic dust
Not — to our eyes — a silencing measure,& it wrote in July
&In fact, Apple has apatent for this exact techdesigned to &prevent and/or alleviate contaminant ingress.
And the date on Apple
ingress-proofing key-cap condom patent September 8, 2016
Read that and weep, MacBook Pro second-half 2016, 2017 and first half 2018 owners.
So if, like me, you&re saddled with a 2017 (or earlier)
you can do about this fatal design flaw in the core interfacing mechanism you must daily touch
Abstention is not an option
We must typo and wait for the inexorable, dust-based doom to strike the space bar or the ‘E& key — which will then make the typing
experience even more miserable (and require a trip to an Apple store to swaddle the misbehaving keys in rubber — leaving us computerless,
most probably, in the meanwhile).
There is an entire novel written without the letter E
I propose that Apple failed keyboard redesign be christened the ‘Gadsby‘ in its honor — because, ye gads, it awful.
This is
especially, especially frustrating because the MacBook Air keyboard was so very, very good.
Not good — it was great
It was as close to typing perfection I&ve come across in a computer
And I&ve been typing on keyboards for a very long time.
Why mess with such a good thing! Marginally thinner than what was already
exceptionally thin hardware is hardly something consumers clamour for.
People are far more interested in having the thing they bought and/or
use actually doing the job they need it for
And definitely not letting them down.
(Or &defienmtely nort letting them down& as the keyboard just reworked the line
I really should have saved every typo and posted a mutant mirror text beneath this one, containing all the thousands of organic instances of
‘found poetry& churned out by the keyboard inner life/poet/drunk.)
If shaving 40% off the profile of the key mechanism transforms an
incredible reliable keyboard into a dust-prone, typo-spewing monster that not progress; it folly of the highest order.
Offering free repairs
to affected users, as Apple finally did in June, doesn''t even begin to fix this fuck up.
Not least because that only a fix for dust-based
death; There isn''t a rubber film in the universe that could make typing on these keys a pleasing experience.
What does it tell us when a
company starts making the quality of its premium products worse Especially a company famed for high-end design and high quality hardware
(Moreover, a company now worth a staggering$1tr+ in market capitalization)
It smacks of complacency, misaligned priorities and worrying
blindspots — at the very least, if not a wider lack of perspective outside the donut-shaped mothership
(Perhaps there been a little too much gathering around indoors in Cupertino lately, and not enough looking out critically at a flaking user
experience… )
Or else, well, it smacks of cynical profiteering.
Clearly it not a good look
Apple reputation rests in large part on its hardware being perceived as reliable
On the famous Steve Jobs& sales pitch that ‘it just works&
So Apple designing a keyboard that great at breaking for no reason at all and lighting fast at churning out typos is a truly epic fail.
Of
course consumer electronic designs won''t always work out
Some failure is to be expected — and will be understood
But what makes the keyboard situation so much worse isApple failure to recognise and accept the problem so that it could promptly clean up
the mess.
Its apparent inability (for so long) to acknowledge there even was a problem is a particularly worrying sign
Having to sneak in a late fix because you didn''t have the courage to publicly admit you screwed up is not a good look for any company —
let alone a company with such a long, rich and storied history as Apple.
More cynical folks out there might whisper it design flaw by
design; A strategic fault-line intended to push users towards an upgrade faster than they might have otherwise have unzipped their wallets
Though Apple offering free keyboard repairs (also, albeit, tardily) contradicts that conspiracy theory.
Yet the notion of ‘built in
obsolescence& persists where consumer computing hardware is concerned, given how corporate profits do tend to be locked to upgrade
cycles.
In Apple case it an easy charge to level at the company given its business model is still, in very large part, driven by hardware
So Apple doing anything that risks encouraging consumers to feel it intentionally making its products worse is also folly of the highest
order.
Apple does have some active accusations to deal with on that front too
For example, a consumer group filed a complaint of planned obsolescence in France late last year — on account of Appleperformance
throttling older iPhones— something the company has faced multiple complaints over and some regulatory scrutiny
So again, it really needs to tread carefully.
Tim Cook Apple cannot afford to be slipshod in its designs nor its communication
Jobs got more latitude on the latter front because he was such a charismatic persona
Cook is lots of good things but he not that; he closer to ‘safe pair of hands& — so company comms should really reflect that.
Apple may
be richer than Croesus and king of the premium heap but it can''t risk tarnishing the brand
The mobile space is littered with the toppled monuments of past giants
And the markets where Apple plays are increasingly fiercely fought
Chinese device makers especially are building momentum with lower priced and highly capable consumer hardware
(Huawei displaced Apple in second place in the global smartphone rankings in Q2, for example).
Apple rivals have mercilessly cloned its
slender laptop designs and copypasted the look and feel of the iPhone
Reliability and usability are the bedrock of the price premium its brand commands, with privacy a more recent bolt-on
So failing on those fundamentals would be beyond foolish, with so many rivals now pushing cheaper priced yet very similarly packaged (and
shiny) alternativesat consumers — which also often offer equal or even greater feature utility for less money (assuming you&re willing to
compromise on privacy).
When it comes to the Mac specifically, it clearly has not been Apple priority for a long time
The iPhone has been its star performer of the past decade,while growing its services business is the fresh focus for Cook
Yet when Cook Apple has paid a little attention to the Mac category it often been to fiddle unnecessarily — such as by clumsily reworking
a great keyboard for purely cosmetic reasons, or to add a silly strip of touchscreen that at best distracting and (in my experience) just
serves up even more unwanted keystrikes
So thrice blighted and the opposite of useful: A fiddly gimmick.
This is worrying.
Apple is a company founded with the word ‘Computer& in
And, even now, while smartphones and tablets are great for lots of things they are not great for sustained writing
For writing — and indeed working — at any length a laptop remains the perfect tool.
There no touchscreen in the world that can beat a
well-designed keyboard for speed, comfort and typing convenience
To a writer, using a great keyboard almost feels like flying.
You wouldn''t have had to explain that to Jobs
He honed his Mac sales pitch to the point of poetry — famously dubbing the Mac a ‘bicycle for the mind&.
Now, sadly, saddled with this
flatfooted and frustratingly flawed mechanic, it like Apple shipped a bicycle with a pair of needles where the pedals should be.
Not so much
thinking different as failing to understand what the machine is for.
