No one who has followed this Apple support document instructing them to shake their laptop at a 75 degree angle and spray their keyboard with air in a precise zig-zag pattern will quibble over a slightly thicker design. Ask any Touch Bar owner if they would trade a tenth of a millimeter for a more reliable keyboard. Traditional key caps are more resilient to dust, and can be removed and individually repaired as necessary. And since the keyboard is part of the monolithic upper case, a single mote can render the computer useless. With the space bar, there’s virtually no way to remove the key cap without destroying the key. The particle wedges underneath the butterfly lever, preventing it from depressing. It’s very challenging to remove it with compressed air. The grain is in the bottom right corner, and it’s completely blocking the key press action. We put a keycap under a microscope and injected a grain of sand so you can see how this happens. Let’s take a look and see what’s actually going on. It’s a damned expensive way to dust a laptop. And that’s why it’s such a big deal-for customers and for shareholders-that Apple is extending the warranty. That’s why Apple has been charging through the nose and taking forever on these repairs. For Apple’s service team, the entire upper half of the laptop is a single component. You also have to replace the glued-in battery, trackpad, and speakers at the same time. You can’t even swap out the upper case containing the keyboard on its own. The keyboard itself can’t simply be swapped out. Her research found that “while some keys can be very delicately removed, the spacebar breaks every single time anyone, including a professional, tries to remove it.” The heroine at the center of this story is Casey Johnston, an editor for The Outline who has reported extensively on this issue since her computer came down with the affliction last year. Dust can block the keycap from pressing the switch, or disable the return mechanism. The basic flaw is that these ultra-thin keys are easily paralyzed by particulate matter.
APPLE 2016 MACBOOK PRO KEYBOARDS UPDATE
(If we can get our hands on one, I’ll update this.) As far as we know, Apple’s new warranty replacements are unchanged-if they had improved, you’d think Apple would mention it-but we haven’t analyzed any units that have shipped in the last few weeks. Anyone who has paid Apple to swap out their upper case in the last two years has most likely gotten the newer design. The 2.0 variant seems to handle dust a bit better, but had been on the market for a year before the volume of complaints reached a fever pitch. They haven’t recovered since.Īpple has shipped two iterations of the butterfly mechanism. The subsequent 2013 update sent the MacBook line into a freefall, earning a mere 1/10-the lowest a notebook had ever earned at that point. We downgraded Apple from a seven-out-of-ten to a two. In our eyes, the new design was a repairability flop. How time-consuming (and therefore expensive) is it to open? Can broken components be replaced individually, or will you have to swap out more expensive larger modules? Our score provides a consumer with an educated guess of repair costs before they buy the product. Unlike the rest of the tech media, we don’t judge products for their release-day usability or aesthetics-we focus on what will happen when the device (inevitably) fails. The new notebook was universally applauded by tech pundits, with one notable exception: my team at iFixit. That radical redesign replaced their rugged, modular workhorse with a slimmed-down frame and first-of-its-kind retina display. The first-gen butterfly keyboard showed up in 2015, but the real root of the problem dates back to 2012 in the very first Retina MacBook Pro. June 2018: Apple announces keyboard replacement program.Late 2017: Keyboard complaints begin to roll in.The switches have likewise gained some heft.” We note in our teardown, “The keycaps are a little taller at the edges, making keys easier to find with your fingers. October, 2016: Apple introduces butterfly 2.0 in the Late 2016 MacBook Pro.March, 2015: Apple introduces butterfly keys in the 2015 MacBook.As it turns out, the initial run of these keyboards, described by Jony Ive as thin, precise, and “sturdy,” has been magnificently prone to failure. Last week, Apple quietly announced that they were extending the warranty on their flagship laptop’s keyboard to four years. A titan of tech and industrial innovation has been laid low by a mere speck of dust.
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