MacBook Keyboard Reliability Dark Matter: People Just Living With Broken Keyboards

David Heinemeier Hansson, writing at Signal vs. Noise:

So here’s some anecdata for Apple. I sampled the people at Basecamp. Out of the 47 people using MacBooks at the company, a staggering 30% are dealing with keyboard issues right now! And that’s just the people dealing with current keyboard issues. If you include all the people who used to have issues, but went through a repair or replacement process, the number would be even higher. […]

But as always, in a time of crisis, the event itself is less indicative of the health of a company than the response. Is Apple going to accept that they’re currently alienating and undermining decades of goodwill by shipping broken computers in mass quantities?

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 how much worse the new arrow key layout is compared to the old inverted-T layout, how much developers miss a hardware Esc key, and the general sentiment regarding the Touch Bar. And while I know some people prefer these new low-travel keys, I feel confident that most people do not.

★ Tuesday, 2 April 2019