It’s Not Just Dust

I’ve gotten a zillion emails and tweets about this Reddit thread from a Mac tech dissecting Apple’s butterfly-switch MacBook keyboards. Like most stuff on Reddit I don’t think it’s very cohesive. It’s like a notebook for an article, not an article. But the author does make one key observation that I don’t think I’ve seen anyone make before, even though it’s obvious to anyone following this saga: If the reliability problem with these keyboards is only about particles getting lodged under the keys, then we should see random keys having problems. But that’s not what we see. What we see are that the most-used keys — vowels (especially “E”) and the space bar — are the keys most likely to get stuck or to start emitting duplicate characters.

I’m sure the dust thing is a real problem, but it’s clearly not the only problem. These keyboards simply aren’t durable.

★ Friday, 3 May 2019