Feels pretty wild to log into my account here for the first time in nearly a decade. (Check out that sweet setup listed in my sig. The good ol' days...)
In 2008,
I made this (embarrassingly overdramatic) thread complaining about how the white polycarbonate MacBook I'd bought after graduating high school had been plagued by issues. After someone suggested emailing
sjobs@apple.com, I did.
I never heard back from Steve himself, but I
did hear back from an executive at Apple Canada, who hooked me up with one of the first unibody MacBooks when they were released just a few weeks later.
Since then, the only computer I've used every day has been a MacBook, and I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to use pretty much every MacBook/Pro/Air design released since then in my work as a content strategist and copywriter. Like
many others, I believe that the 2015 MacBook Pro is the best laptop Apple has ever made — and for a time, the best laptop
any company had ever made.
But times have changed. It's fair to say that not only does the current MacBook lineup falls far short of the high standards sets by its predecessors, it represents a poor value compared to other devices in the marketplace at pretty much every price point.
And that's all before you factor in that the keyboards are literally defective.
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I had the (never truly) keyboard in my touchbar MBP replaced when the T key suddenly stopped responding one day, and then just kinda... fell off. But the replacement keyboard that Apple installed frequently missed inputs that I was certain I had made. My employer let me go back to using a 2015 MBP, which I quickly fell in love with all over again.
When I recently switched roles to join a startup around the time the new MacBook Air was released, and was asked to choose a new laptop from Apple (since we have a business account), I took a leap of faith hoping that the new silicon membrane would actually resolve the issue —
even though Apple never said it was supposed to do that, even though actually it's totally supposed to do that).
As you all know, it doesn't do that. In fact, my experience with the 2018 MacBook Air keyboard was far worse than with the pre-membrane Pro. Within a few months, I was having missed and/or duplicate inputs from many keys, in particularly commonly hit keys like the spacebar and vowel keys. The worst part was that my CMD key only worked about 75% of the time, which quickly began to drive me into a state of madness. Unshaky logged thousands of blocked duplicate keypresses before I stopped checking the counter, but it unfortunately cannot help with inputs that the keyboard misses entirely.
I took it to my local Apple Store and admitted to the Genius I was nervous as it's difficult to replicate intermittent issues in front of someone, but he readily acknowledged the keyboard issues in the MacBook line and assured me I would get a new "top case", which as I'm sure most of you know, is the chimera of keyboard, battery and upper part of the chassis fused together as to be nearly inseparable and irreparable. To call the top case swap that Apple performs in the face of these keyboard issues a repair is too generous — it's more of a refurbishing.
While the Genius tried to sell us on the Joint Venture program, which allows businesses to pay a recurring fee for the privilege of receiving a loaner laptop from Apple while they work on your machine, we opted to simply buy a new MacBook Air with the intention of returning it within the 14-day window.
But out of the box, the new Air was skipping inputs. Apple would reach out to me a few days later to tell me that they couldn't replicate the issue, and after I refused their request to try formatting the OS to see if it was a software-related issue (!?), they offered to switch the key cap and "give it a good cleaning."
I think you all can guess where this is going. My squeaky-clean keyboard performs no more impressively then my presumably crumb-laden one. I still press CMD+C five times out of paranoia. I frequently have to rewrite sentences in my work, and even end up missing some mistakes that I don't spot till later. I feel as if I am losing many hours of productivity daily, fighting against a machine that's designed to help me get stuff done.
I spend all day typing, and I type pretty hard. Yet my pre-butterfly MacBooks rarely buckled under the pressure. In the rare instance that something was stuck under a key, and the one time I had one of the scissor switches break, you could just... take them off and put them back on.
How does this happen? How does Apple knowingly ship a defective keyboard design for three years, that they themselves cannot repair or even properly clean? Including in a major new flagship product just released that
Tim Cook blames Intel for not being able to meet demand for? A product that never should have been released in the state that it was, and should be recalled for the state that it's in?
Apple's "repairs" cannot fix these keyboard issues, and so it's pointless to continue the theatre of bringing it in to have one defective component replaced with another that's destined to fail, if it works functionally to begin with. That doesn't include the productivity cost of making multiple trips to the Apple Store and being without your machine.
Like many of you, I'd had enough. And uh,
also seemingly like many of you, I bought a ThinkPad instead.
And I love it.
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While I'm happy to see some others here were able to receive refunds from Apple out of the return period, we weren't so lucky. After I received my ThinkPad, we returned our local Apple Store to try to return the 2018 MacBook Air for good. While they were willing to admit fault for not doing the top case replacement we were promised the first time around, the only solution they were willing to offer was to do the replacement this time.
Our requests for a refund or even a credit on our business account were repeatedly rebuffed, even as we made it clear that we had no intention of using this machine ever again. The manager did mention that they would be willing to buy it from us for about half of what we paid, but as the Genius next to them helpfully pointed out, we could probably get more selling it privately.
I switched from iOS to Android last summer after using the former for nearly as long as I'd been using MacBooks. Now it's hard to imagine a future where I return to using Apple products, something I find myself surprised to say. When Steve Jobs passed, I was one of those who legitimately believed the company would be fine without him; that his ideas had woven themselves into the cultural DNA of Apple.
But this keyboard situation is pretty much the embodiment of "Steve Jobs would have never let this happen."
