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“. 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 result? A laptop that’s lightning quick at creating a typo-ridden mess, and slow as hell to clean it up. 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. Which is hard to avoid because, y’know, everything in the world is made of dust. It equally countlessly fails to disengage when re-pressed. No thanks to the technologies involved.)Īt the same time Caps Lock routinely fails to engage when pressed, as if it’s practising for when it’ll be broken. (Fortunately I didn’t have auto-send enabled so I could catch that unintended slapdown in the act before it was delivered. (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. This demonic keyboard has summoned Siri unasked.
#Keyboard with app keys for mac pro pro#
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. But that would have an obvious impact on your ability to work by slowing down your ability to write. I guess you could type really slowly to try to avoid making all these high-speed typos. You can’t press keys on a keyboard radically differently. It’s shockingly bad.Īs design snafus go, this is up there with antenna-gate. Instead, Apple has made a keyboard for making audible typos. 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. (Or, well, Apple designers got to overindulge their blue-sky thinking around the idea that ‘in space no one can hear you type’.) It’s like mobile phone keyclicks suddenly got dizzingly back in fashion. Because, as I say, the act of using the keyboard results in audible clackclackery. 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.Īpple has also had to make these keyboards quieter.
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, as particles 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. Most egregiously it’s not reliably functional. Scattershot staccato clattering, as your fingers are simultaneously sucked in and involuntarily hammer out a grapeshot of key strikes, is what actually happens. Reader, there is nothing remotely beautiful and butterfly-esque about the experience of depressing these keys. 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.
But I am also very annoyed so I am adding my voice to the now sustained chorus of complaints about Apple’s redesigned Mac keyboard: How very much it sucks.
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