People will spin in circles to give Ive credit for things and spin in circles again to defend him even if said products came out around the same time. It is ok to admit he isn't perfect and he made some bad decisions along the way.
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Judge Approves Apple's Plan to Pay $50 Million to Settle Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit
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You'd first have to prove he mandated the exact thickness or designed the switches.
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True. There were many products he designed which had some hardware failures. For example, the TiBooks and AlBooks had a tendency to crack at the hinge after a number of years of use and the MacBook top-plate plastic became brittle and cracked, but I can't say for sure that he structurally designed the hinge mounts or formulated the plastic.
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Exactly.
I went years without updating. I tried out several models years of MBP butterfly keys at the Apple stores. They were both unreliable and awful. Good riddance to the touchbars too!
I will be glad to update regularly, with return to friendlier input in the MBA & MBP lines.
Yeah Im glad I skipped them. It allowed me to go from a superb 2014 MBP to an M1 MBP.
Unfortunately, your comment reminds me of Samsung's recent foldable advert where two Apple devotees say "we wait". Dang that advert has an element of truth about it!It'll be a good time to upgrade to the upcoming M2 MBP anyways.
AS > Intel
Truthfully, I didn't mind the butterfly keyboard except its reliability; it seemed fine until it hit that 6-12mo mark, then it started to tyyyyype diiiiifffffeerrently. Thankfully, at no time did I have trouble getting it serviced or repaired in a respectable amount of time.
I've had two keybaords replaced on my current 2017 MacBook Pro, two on the one it replaced. The current replacement on my 2017 seems to have held out OK but I'm not holding my breath.
Candidly, I have to wonder if this was but one more nail in Ive's coffin @ Apple but I digress.
I've had two keybaords replaced on my current 2017 MacBook Pro, two on the one it replaced. The current replacement on my 2017 seems to have held out OK but I'm not holding my breath.
Candidly, I have to wonder if this was but one more nail in Ive's coffin @ Apple but I digress.
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Imagine a company worth trillions has so many inept suits at head office approving a poorly made switch.
To be fair, there are a bunch of entitled people out there that demand perfection from Apple. Whether Apple responded in the right way is what matters.
People griped about the screen tearing when scrolling aggressively on the iPad mini 6.
It was faulty. It was a garbage design.
We knew it. Apple knew it. We told Apple it was a garbage design. Apple lied and said nothing was wrong.
This should have been a MUCH higher award settlement against Apple.
We knew it. Apple knew it. We told Apple it was a garbage design. Apple lied and said nothing was wrong.
This should have been a MUCH higher award settlement against Apple.
'Class Action Lawsuit' over a keyboard – or throwing your toys out of the pram?
Life's not perfect, move on, let it go!
Life's not perfect, move on, let it go!
The computer became unable to be used, 2000 dollar machines were virtually paperweights. This was a big deal.
He was the design chief, so EVERYTHING about that laptops design went through him. He approved that piece of **** keyboard. He pushed EVERYONE to make EVERYTHING as THIN as possible. It's on him. To refute that is a special kind of excusism that is bending over backwards to defend that one-note designer.
He surely examined their design and approved it. But the bigger folly was that for another FIVE ****ing years they kept selling laptops with that piece of crap keyboard even though they KNEW it was flawed!
I baby all by computers, laptops especially. But I'm pretty anal about that kind of stuff.
That said, for a couple decades, kids, teens, adults all over the world had used laptops and didn't pay much attention to whether they were eating a cookie or whatever why working their laptop.
It NEVER was an issue ... until ... Apple came out with a computer keyboard that human beings - being human - used like they always had. All the sudden, those awesome butterfly keyboards crumbled like the cookie they were eating.
Apple, as they tend to do, designed something not for what humans actually do and want, but instead for what Apple wants.
That's the unknown. While he approved the design, did he approve it before or after negative results from the hardware durability testers were logged? A lot of issues were caused by debris getting under the keys, but were the initial keyboards tested in clean rooms? Were the keyboards tested as part of the top plate?
Obviously Apple should have gone back to scissor switch sooner than they did, but I wonder how much authority Ive would have had to dictate when the next MBP was designed.
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Now: will Apple provide replacement keyboards for users of these machines?
Or at least let the aftermarket make replacement keyboards?
These were some EXCELLENT laptops, I moved right from my 2011 to a late 2019 16” i9 to avoid this issue.
As millions of these begin to hit the secondary market I think there will be a need for replacement keyboards, even if they cost $250-350.
Or at least let the aftermarket make replacement keyboards?
These were some EXCELLENT laptops, I moved right from my 2011 to a late 2019 16” i9 to avoid this issue.
As millions of these begin to hit the secondary market I think there will be a need for replacement keyboards, even if they cost $250-350.
Attachments
I accept it was a big deal, but I think the Youtube hammering that Apple received over this achieved more than giving millions of dollars to lawyers to extract a few dollars.
Nope. You may not be aware that there are project managers, system engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, software engineers, test engineers, reliability engineers, QA engineers, packaging designers, and on and on.
Ive was not responsible for nor designed the keyboard. He certainly did the industrial design (look, feel, materials, top-level aspects, etc) and items relating to it. And because of that the keyboard dimensions/thicknes/etc were cast by him. But whether the keyboard key switches used a butterfly mechanism or some other key switch design was not up to him.
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Ive was actually the one who announced and presented that device, as is evident in the video for the MacBook Pro launch from 2016:
This was also the model that featured the Touch Bar, another achievement by Apple that was nifty from a designer’s standpoint, but ultimately did not add much benefit for most users.
So, Jony Ive was absolutely aware of these design changes, and we can’t say otherwise. There’s no need to point the blame at just him, though. What’s to be gained if we did? Apple put out a lemon
, so the whole company was and is responsible.Like many of Apple’s failed ideas, it was a good idea on paper, but they just didn’t put it through enough real-world testing to prove that this would be the bees-knees for the customers. (One of the chief reasons why I sold my 2016 MBP was because of that clicky, noisy keyboard. They improved the clickiness in later iterations, but I also suffered from a faulty butterfly keyboard on a MacBook Air 2018 just a few years later.)
Now we can close that sad chapter in Apple’s product design and manufacturing history, and hope for the better. Apple’s keyboards now are now practically world-class, so at least there was progress.
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