A titan of tech and industrial innovation has been laid low by a mere speck of dust. Last week, Apple quietly announced that they were extending the warranty on their flagship laptop’s keyboard by four years. 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.
When you see it all spelled out like this, it makes Apple look either incredibly incompetent, or astonishingly arrogant.
Yeah, Apple will run out of money for repairing laptops they sold at an obscene margin anyways, sure…
I don’t understand this comment. Lets assume that by some miracle they do still make a profit after repairs.
Pre butterfly: Apple sells $1500 laptop, $500 initial profit $0 keyboard repair. Total profit $500
Butterfly: Apple Sells $1500 laptop, $500 initial profit – $300 repair = $200 Profit
Would you rather make $500 or $200? As a shareholder, would you be happy or upset that the company profit is now 2/5ths of what it was because of a dumb engineering decision?
The “downfall” thing was a bit too much though.
Though I don’t think the repairs will be that expensive for Apple, all in-house…
Or they are just spinning their wheels because bugger-all innovation is happening the Mac hardware or software space. Even the touch bar smacks of ‘because we can!’
That touchbar added like $600 or more to the base price compared with previous generation hardware. It’s sorta kinda cool, but it’s not $600 cool…
Then you add that to the diminished battery life, the crappy GPU, and the utterly broken keyboard, and it’s like – why wouldn’t I just buy a Razer Blade Pro (oh yeah, Windows, argh! I’m so stuck here…)
The MBP pricing is really obscene, much more so in Europe, and I guess anywhere outside the US.
I just got a Dell XPS 15 with a 6-core i7 and 4K touchscreen for 1850€. Apple has a 4-core i7 with that gimmicky touchstrip and a somewhat slower graphics chip for 3300€!! That is 1450€ more to get considerably less!! Giving up half the flash drive and much graphics power would save 500€ for a wannabe machine that would still be 1000€ more expensive.
And that is before you start adding the adaptors for all the ports it does not have.
This is not about quality: I have an MBP on my office desk and it is truly a beautifully made machine, but hey, I’m talking about a Dell XPS made of milled aluminum and carbon fiber, not a $200 eeePC. Neither it is macOS: whether it is better or worse than W10 is completely debatable.
And yeah, don’t rile me up with the keyboard. Even if it doesn’t break, the key combinations are a total mess that often make me want to hurl the machine out of the window.
The trackpad in the MBP is great, that has to be said. And the “Essentials” programs (GarageBand, iMovie, iPhoto etcetera) are very good, and Microsoft does not offer anything comparable, much less for free.
I’m normally a Linux user, and tend to use my MBP at work with lots of terminals and keyboard combinations to move things around the screen, and a few XQuartz applications like Inkscape. Add to that a PC mechanical keyboard which OSX doesn’t want to exactly match, and you have a situation of constant aggravation!
Is it Cmd+something, Ctrl+something, Alt (Option)+something? Which key is backslash today? Who knows. Life seems so much easier when I go home to my Linux machine.
Thom Holwerda,
Or a third possibility that only those of us inside the tech industry seem to understand: engineers did the best they would within the constraints set by management, but the engineering concerns raised were ignored. I can’t count the number of times when I/we knew about problems and raised issues only to be told by management it wasn’t worth fixing. This is what happens when companies adopt form over function and engineering becomes secondary to design, marketing, etc.
You’re right – my use of “engineering team” here is incredibly unfortunate. Let me fix that.
But it does make the engineering team look incompetent. Alfman is right, but management get that way because they know it will look like the engineering team is at fault.
It’s the look they’re going for.
So basically arrogance but not from the engineering teams
Edited 2018-06-29 03:09 UTC
Sigh. My exact same thought.
Design Over Engineering. That is the problem with Johny / Apple at the moment.
Design is how it works, or it should be how *well* it works, not how it looks.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the pursuit of thinness, but it needs to be in perfection, making it thin, while working better then previous keyboard, and much more reliable.
The problem with Apple right now, not just Mac, is that they are taking one step forward and two step back. The trade off are crap. No one understand or wants it.
That is possible, but lets be honest: Engineers can be very arrogant when their design is challenged.
Sometimes Management listens to what the Engineering and QA teams believe about their designs and it really is an Engineering/QA failure.
The design criteria for a product to which the Engineering and QA teams must adhere to are generally set by Management with hints from Marketing.
Technology products would likely look different internally than they do know if there was a “Repairability Assessment” team in the mix.
In addition, real life use of a new product design should be considered at the prototype stage.
In this case, people take their notebook to the beach, or in a park, or may have to work in a dusty environment. Having tested the butterfly keyboard design in such environment before committing to production would have rapidly pointed to the “grain-of-sand” issue highlighted in the story.
Once identified, the issue could have been steam-rolled by management or handled pro-actively. Pro-active approaches could have been implementing an internal design aiming at ease of replacement of the keyboard. Or, better still, having redesigned the keyboard so that the butterfly key action would have been less likely to be impeded by a grain of dust/sand.
I’ll be the first to admit, I do not know how things are designed, engineered or built at Apple. All of this is speculation based on what I’ve experienced in the industry.
But, yes in hindsight they should have tested to see how it performs in less than clean room levels of filth. That isn’t typically part of a testing phase for keyboards/laptops outside of tough-books. When you push boundaries, you hit obstacles that no one has hit before. I don’t fault them for selling a product that has flaws. I fault them for not fixing it, but continuing to sell faulty designs and incorporate those bad designs into more and more products. This is why we have a national automakers recall system. left alone in the marketplace giant companies will make terrible decisions like this.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I don’t mean to pick specifically on apple, it’s a widepsread problem that many engineers will face throughout their careers. This can span numerous engineering disciplines, from trivial websites and consumer electronics to life threatening systems like nuclear reactors.
Here’s a documentary about “windscale”, briton’s first foray into nuclear reactors where engineer’s safety concerns were routinely ignored and overridden by the higher-ups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ4vtUzG6sQ
It’s very long, but quite an interesting bit of history.
Edited 2018-06-29 17:59 UTC
Engineers: blaming others since the beginning of time.
I used a macbook pro as my portable work machine for the last several years. However after some battery issues, I had to move away from the platform.
They had the (almost) perfect machine in older MBP design. It had a gorgeous screen, lots of ports, fast operating system, and a great keyboard. They switched half of the useful features with a useless touch bar.
I might be part of a dying breed, and Apple probably made some market research, and decided to cut us off. The “pro” no longer means it is geared towards professionals, but probably a more expensive version of the air line.
Considering the default MacBook is now running with a fanless tablet processor that you wouldn’t be able to sell with a Windows laptop due to being underpowered, it’s all arrogance now. They’re Apple, and they know people will buy it as a fashion item and for the myth that it’s immune to malware.
Why not both?
Dust issues notwithstanding, the inclusion of the on/off switch inside the keyboard is a red flag for me. Bad keyboard? Can’t start/stop the computer. With a separate on/off switch and bad keyboard, you can plug in an external keyboard and hobble along. My next laptop will not be an Apple. And this from a true blue Apple-holic.
Current Macbooks don’t really require a power switch at all. They power on whenever opened or plugged into AC. you can power them off using OS shutdown. I have never actually used the power switch on my Macbook. You can disable this of course and just use the switch, but I don’t see any reason to.
I’m sure this was just going to be used as a transition over to keyless, like the Fingerworks patents (Touchstream) they bought to integrate into the iPhone. Just a gateway to getting people used to not having as much key travel.
I miss my Touchstream.
Wallis Simpson said, “You can never be too rich or too thin” – well, we know that ain’t so.
Too thin and you die, too rich and money loses all meaning.
Thinness in cellphone and laptops reaches a point of diminishing returns – after a certain point:
Structural integrity becomes a problem – drop it and its done for.
Battery-life becomes a problem, both in terms of capacity and lifetime. In real-life most phones and laptops now are starting to fade at 14hrs and constantly having to remember to top ’em up during the day is a real drag – wireless or not.
Heat dissipation becomes a major engineering challenge.
With the constant compromises, usability becomes a problem, both in terms of the user interface and handleability.
Low weight is good up to a point, but eventually surface stability and real laptop typing gets harder.
Essentially laptops and smartphones are supposed to be tools, not fashion accessories.
When fashion makes the tool more difficult to use, that’s when I get off the bus.
I really couldn’t care if my smartphone or laptop is a few mm thinner or 200gm heavier than the competition – if it won’t give me >24hrs of reasonable use, or stand-up to a knock or two (or a few grains of sand) then I don’t wanna know.
Mac