I seen 10 pages of you religiously defending Apple with zero evidence to support your point of view other than Apple fanboy trolling.
......
More hard numbers:
https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/apple-macbook-keyboard-failure-rate
Apple Insider collected data from many Apple-authorized repair shops and found a 5-11.8 percent failure rate.
I know you'll ignore this evidence in this post though because it didn't come from Apple, who has been "oh so honest" in the past, requiring lawsuits to get them to reluctantly admit fault and cover repairs under warranty.
Actually that particular hard numbers shows that the 2016 keyboard failure rate was higher than the 2017 rate (the 2nd generation ). From the article.
" ... The data shows a failure rate of 11.8 percent for the keyboard on the 2016 MacBook Pro, or 165 issues out of 1402. That rate for 2015 was just 6 percent. The 2015 model had a similar failure rate of 5.6 percent. ..."
2017 looks a bit better for the MacBook Pro’s 2nd-generation Butterfly keyboard, but not by much, and Apple Insider notes that it does not include a full year’s worth of data. It shows 8.1 percent of service events related to the keyboard. ... "
So the there was a 8-9% drop from gen 1 to gen 2. The gen 2 keyboards were only about 2% over the base rate of the "good design" keyboard (even the previous design failed at a rate over 5%). Apple is now on gen 4.
That they are still selling gen 2 keyboards in some models is beyond lame. There are perhaps approximately 10 million gen 1's out there so 8% of that will be a large number of folks on their own ( 800 thousand). But apply the previous rate to 10 million also. 5% of 10 million means there were 500 thousand folks that had keyboard problems
before the butterfly keyboard. The pool of folks impacted with the gen 1 doubled which caused a spike.
However the pool in the "increase rate" has been going down. The gap is 2-3% (by these numbers) now. So the increased pool would be 2-300K.
That it took Apple 4 years to get to gen 4. is also pretty lame. But where the keyboards are not and where they started off in 2015-6 is different. if Apple got a similar a 5% reduction on the next two iterations ( going from 50% reduction to order of magnitude smaller) the gen 4 failure rate would be around 7% which isn't too far off the 2015 numbers. if Apple has had two 10% reductions they'd been in the same ballpark.
The part where the "echo chamber" has some traction when the disaster of the gen 1 keyboards being held up as why the gen 4 are bad. In part it is the gen 1 design failures echoing into the present. The 2015-16 systems are going to cost Apple money. For those systems the 4 year extended warranty is probably a bit too short ( for folks who bought AppleCare that's really only a 1 year increase, which is lame for the depth of Apple's lack of diligence in design evaluation. It should have been 4 years after whatever warranty/plan you had with Apple. ).
From the description of the gen 4 mechanism it seems as though some of the issue was not in the 'butterfly' nature of the mechanism, but in the Scrooge McDuck selection of the parts. Apple went for cheaper rather than better.
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I do agree that there is no reason to have a MBA with the current MB. It's a shame really, they should keep the Air product line for size and not intentionally cripple their MB and MBP product lines for the sake of thiness.
Part of the problem is that at around 2011 Apple switched roles for the names. There are two roles. One is the affordable Mac laptop. The other is the one created with the original MBA introduction; the penutlimate lightest/thinnest Mac laptop.
Around 2010-11, Apple dropped the 'Macbook' as an active product name and push the MBA into the role the 'Macbook' had classically covered. At some later point Apple decided to being the "penultimate' role back and had an 'unused' Macbook name so just slapped that name on the now new roles.
Much of the "there is no reason for the two" tends to arise out of the notion that both are competing for the same "penultimate" slot. Or that they are playing their pre-2011 name assignment roles.
There is room for both names if Apple went back to trying to fill the "affordable" Mac laptop role with something that is normally substantively under $1K ( like $899 not just a dollar $999). Apple appears to be chasing higher average selling prices, but that chase is the core conflict. The MBA fills that "affordable" role so it is probably not going away. [ some folks still cling to the MBA being an 'upscale' branding ... it isn't. Apple is just leverage that notion to help justify why their entry model is so much higher than the mainstream prices. That isn't the role is actually playing in the line up. ]
Apple perhaps wanting to dabble with ARM Macs is another reason for the MacBook in its current "1 port wonder" form to still be hanging around. An iPad Pro SoC would be a better fit with the design limitations. The system would be a good excuse for why Apple "had to" go homegrown because Intel/AMD couldn't deliver. If Apple wanted to shift gears and bring back an iBook ( with iPad OS) it is a candidate for that too. It is probably not going away because it has these useful jumping off points with some relatively minor modifications.
So yes there are reasonable reasons why they probably are keeping both. They aren't solely short term focused.