Apple Exploring New Glass Panel MacBook Keyboards That Could End Sticky Key Problems

[MacsRuleOthersDrool]

Looks like reinventing the terrible 1970s Atari 400, Magnavox Odyssey 2, etc. membrane keyboard before the upgrade to mechanical keyboard. So, going backwards.

Wrong.

Apple's ideas are a lot more sophisicated than a piece of Lexan film over a circuit board with bifurcated circular contact-pads.
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This has been my fear all along. It's full-on Munchausen Syndrome: make a perfectly healthy keyboard sick just so you can "cure" it with your stupid thin and light agenda. There was nothing wrong with the last generation of keyboards or antiglare screens or I/O or MagSafe...

Please fire Tim, Jony, Eddie, and... MAKE APPLE 2012 AGAIN

Oh, so you want to bring back the Design language that led to the Cylindrical Mac Pro?

I didn't think so...
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It’s not about a device working well anymore, it’s how thin Ive and his team can make it. Jobs is gone, it no longer has to function.

Do you realize how ridiculous that statement is?

 

[MrBat]

Just kill the MacBook line already. A this stage, anything that's not an iPhone is irrelevant to Apple.

 

[falainber]

patent application called "Computer with keyboard"

Now that is true innovation!

 

[YaBe]

If I wanted to type on glass, i'd be using....an iPad...

 

[4487549]

Apple should look at the failure that is the touch bar. Replacing tactile feedback for this nonsense is just not equivalent.

I wish. The lightbar was the harbinger of what's to come. It was clear from day one that this was their intention. Just look at the iPhone (vs Blackberry, Palm...). Unfortunately for us, they don't listen to our feedback. Instead, they tell us what we want. It's always been this way. They're just not as good at it anymore.

 

[Think creative]

It’s just a patent. If it comes out, then it’s an issue. I’m a writer, and my main machine is my imac. For a laptop, I’m about to buy a 2015 MacBook Pro because it’s keyboard does what I want it to. Type well. New keyboards are mush, and RSI inducing nightmares. Yes, there are a few posters here that say they like typing on them, but they don’t write as much as a professional writer. Now, I don’t love the action on the ipad keyboard attachment, but it’s better. Once I have the 2015, I’ll keep that bad boy till at least 2021. Hopefully Apple’s gone a different direction, and if they haven’t... for my portable needs either it will be an IPad or shrugs a X1 Carbon thinkpad?

 

[MacsRuleOthersDrool]

Real professionals don't want this. Give us a good keyboard again. My MBP 2018 is barely tolerable, I still mostly have to use it with an external Magic Keyboard via Bluetooth. The butterfly keyboards are not good for people that actually use the keyboards all day long.

Funny then that this thread is replete with dozens of comments from "Real Professionals" (whatever THAT means!) that say they love the 2016-2018 keyboard design, and that they type for hours on end on it.

So, please don't confuse your personal taste with everyone else's. It's unbecoming.
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I have a sneaking suspicion that my 2013 13" rMBP is going to have to keep chugging along until 2020 for even the slightest possibility of (what I consider) a better keyboard and a 15" MBP without the $300.00 Touch Bar option. I also think there's about a 1% chance that either of those desires will ever be filled.

If it existed today I would have a new Mac in front of me right now. My measly 4GB of RAM is maxed out every time I use the computer. What to do? On one hand I'm saving money, but on the other I need the right computer for business reasons. Darn keyboard. If they do make another model I love (like the 2013) I am going to max that thing out like it's nobody's business and hang on to it for a good long time. Frustrating.

Stick 16 GB (or at least 8) of RAM and an SSD (if you don't have one already), and that 2013 MBP will be good to go for another 5 years...

 

[Think creative]

Funny then that this thread is replete with dozens of comments from "Real Professionals" (whatever THAT means!) that say they love the 2016-2018 keyboard design, and that they type for hours on end on it.

So, please don't confuse your personal taste with everyone else's. It's unbecoming.

The professional part I agree with. However, I’m suspicious of how much these people actual type. If they’re in an office environment, that pretty much equals distractions and emails here and there. It’s not hours a day just typing. Every heavy coder and writer I know either uses the old style keyboards, Thinkpads, or Mechanical keyboards. That’s because they’re the ones doing The heavy lifting in terms of fingers on the keyboard. Not a couple thousand words a day, like at least 5,000 and up to 12,000 words.

 

[Naraxus]

Tim's duplicity on full display yet again. Didn't he once claim that converging a toaster and a fridge was a bad idea and here he is fully talking out his a ss like always
[doublepost=1549310258][/doublepost]Ive and Cook can't be shoved out the door fast enough.

 

[Suttree]

I’ve not used the Touch Bar for long periods of time, however a friend of mine who video edits for a living love it, he swears that it saves time when editing.

Just out of curiosity, how does it help in Pages? I use it daily as well as was wondering if the Touch Bar MacBook Pro would be better for me than the new MacBook Air.

In Pages, some documents I work on require a lot of formatting—like preparing hefty game design documents or outlines and the Touch Bar provides shortcuts for formatting options without having to use the trackpad and drill through tabs and menus. And the Touch Bar is dynamic so the controls change depending on context, if text is selected for example. It’s fantastic. I can focus more on creating content than fussing around with menu-ing.

 

[Wiesenlooser]

Nononono - this is even worse. No more movable keys at ALL?

 

[MacsRuleOthersDrool]

Apple is always on the quest to cut costs and maximize profits, no surprise there every company does, but apple is doing it to the detriment of their product line

Do you REALLY think that doing R&D for a new keyboard switch design is CHEAPER than just churning out the previous design year-after-year?

Sorry, unless something in the scissors mechanism suddenly became unobtainable, then Apple designed the butterfly keyboard switches to IMPROVE the design. Obviously, they didn't quite get it right when it came to foreign-object incursion; but many people seem to love the new keyboard feel over the old scissors mechanism.

 

[Magnificenthack]

I'd have to test it, but if it's as bad in real life as this article makes it seem, a design change like this would almost certainly mark the end of a 32-year exclusive relationship with Apple.

 

[MacsRuleOthersDrool]

The professional part I agree with. However, I’m suspicious of how much these people actual type. If they’re in an office environment, that pretty much equals distractions and emails here and there. It’s not hours a day just typing. Every heavy coder and writer I know either uses the old style keyboards, Thinkpads, or Mechanical keyboards. That’s because they’re the ones doing The heavy lifting in terms of fingers on the keyboard. Not a couple thousand words a day, like at least 5,000 and up to 12,000 words.

One of the posters said they type 5-7,000 words per day, every day.

 

[kingtj]

More like, thank you for paying to purchase our first attempts at getting the product right. You won't be compensated by receiving the final version that works properly. You can resell your existing computer and buy one of those at full price when we have it finished.

Thank you for beta testing everyone.

 

[LetsStewIt]

As everyone else is saying bring back the keyboard from 2015 MacBook Pro. It seems not many care to have the extra thinness over function. If someone really wanted thin there is the MacBook Air...

 

[Acronyc]

Just because there is a patent doesn’t mean the technology will go into production. Apple, as do its competitors, has lots of patents that don’t make it into mass market devices.

 

[rumplestiltskin]

If any Apple personnel are reading this thread: Hey, Tim! My next new laptop won't be an Apple product. I have many choices of laptops using normal keyboards that are both thin and light enough. Dell, Asus, HP, Acer, etc. all manufacture very nice laptops. Oh, they're not running macOS and not using APFS? Those are benefits in my book.

 

[Think creative]

One of the posters said they type 5-7,000 words per day, every day.

Okay, well I'm curious how they're hands will hold up in more than a year. Also, I'm still a small sample size, probably three dozen people I've talked to about this issue, and everyone hates it other than one person, who doesn't care and doesn't type much. So, between that and this forum, there does seem to be a direction this all leans too. Yes, one person here prefers it, everyone else I know who types that much thinks it's tolerable at best, garbage and won't buy it at worst

 

[Kabeyun]

Right. You mean an IBM Model "M", right?

Heh. Many liked that one, but I found it too clicky. My favorite so far is the Apple wireless keyboard (same as the earlier Apple laptops before the butterfly disaster). Perfect.

I disagree with you that glass can possibly provide the proper tactile feedback. Maybe possible with a press (à la the most recent iteration of the iPhone home button), but we don’t press when we type. It’s a psychophysical phenomenon from the small timing difference (and physical yield) between when the fingertip contacts the key and when it hits the end of travel. I don’t care how clever they get with glass, raised “keys,” and haptics, it’ll still feel like we’re tapping away on a glass window.

 

[glassyeyed]

I'd gladly take a modest increase in thickness in exchange for getting the previous generation keyboard back.

Edit: And based on those above that beat me to the submit button, I'm clearly not alone.

Since Huawei managed to put a keyboard without design flaws and a decent feel into their MacBook clone(s) which have about the same thickness, it's NOT about thickness.

It's about Apple's crappy engineering.

 

[barmann]

Do you REALLY think that doing R&D for a new keyboard switch design is CHEAPER than just churning out the previous design year-after-year?

Sorry, unless something in the scissors mechanism suddenly became unobtainable, then Apple designed the butterfly keyboard switches to IMPROVE the design. Obviously, they didn't quite get it right when it came to foreign-object incursion; but many people seem to love the new keyboard feel over the old scissors mechanism.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the consensus seems to be that the butterfly keyboards suck .
And no, not many people seem to love them, apart from those who are affiliated with Apple . ...

Also, Apple tends to stick with poor design desicions - the touchbar is universally hated, yet it is forced on anyone who want's to buy a recent MBP with the new GPU or more than 2 usable ports .

 

[Dave245]

In Pages, some documents I work on require a lot of formatting—like preparing hefty game design documents or outlines and the Touch Bar provides shortcuts for formatting options without having to use the trackpad and drill through tabs and menus. And the Touch Bar is dynamic so the controls change depending on context, if text is selected for example. It’s fantastic. I can focus more on creating content than fussing around with menu-ing.

Interesting, I wonder how many people in the general world like the Touch Bar, by that i mean the large number of the population who buy these devices but don’t visit it post on these forums. It’s diffuclt to tell if something is a success or failure, if you base it on the people who post and visit this site then everything for the past few years has been a failure, but in reality I think that’s further from the truth, but we simply can’t base it off that because the number of people on this forum will be far less than the general population of people who buy these devices.

It’s good to hear something positive about the Touch Bar from someone else (other than my friend who loves it for video editing).

 

[sunapple]

I didn't imply that it was; in fact, I implied the opposite. I said I wanted an improvement on that design, which means that I was admitting the design wasn't without its own flaws. What I was stating is that if Apple had spent the time to make that experience better (as I said before, improving wobble, actuation, etc.; i.e., creating the perfect guitar string), it could've simply stopped "innovating" on the one aspect of their machines that was damn near perfect.

I don't want the promise of a "might be" better keyboard. I got behind the USB-C/connectivity debacle; I got over the lack of MagSafe; and although I hated the oversized trackpad (which caused me headaches many times), I found ways to get through most of my gripes. I don't need thinner, nor do I need lighter. I don't need a glowing Apple logo. I don't miss the disk drive. I don't even care that we lost the SD Card slot. I want Apple to stop treating the MacBook Pro like a normal consumer product. I want them to recognize that very few of the professionals who use these machines require the device to operate much differently than it did a decade ago. All I want to see is internals that keep up with the changing and expanding demands of the software I use, and an interface device that allows me to use it without obstacles. That's literally it.

Reduce the bezels, make the screen better, add Thunderbolt 4 when that eventually comes to market, make the trackpad seamless with the aluminum body; craft the entire device out of the recycled scales of North Pacific salmon that died of natural causes. Whatever they do, the interface I use to interact with that Mac -- the keyboard -- should not be the sole reason why it's challenging to use that Mac. When you've created a barrier that exists at the very first point of contact with your device, you've created a problem that you can only address by going BACK to the iteration that worked.

I can't get behind the philosophy that moving backwards and staying with the safe old tech yield the best results. That would be a short-sighted temporary solution which in the end won't hold up. They failed with these new keyboards, but if that leads to a new type that's way more durable than it ever was and also spill-proof, the complaints go away surprisingly quickly. You can already hear the 'professionals' brag about their new machine with the best keyboard on the market, who totally forgot the sleepless nights they had over the Butterfly mechanism.

On the one side you have people complaining Apple doesn't innovate and hasn't released any significant updates in years, on the other side there are a dozen professionals who want everything to always stay the same. If they all got acces to the design lab and could make that one perfect machine, they would probably take just as many years and iterations and make as many mistakes as Apple did, if not more. Oh and it has to sell well too, we sold 5 million last quarter so try to keep up, good luck!

 

[teknikal90]

remember when nasa spent lots of $$$ developing a pen that can work in space and the russians instead just used pencils?