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RIP Butterfly Keyboard: Apple Finally Completes Transition to Magic Keyboard

dguisinger said:
You are delusional if that is what you truly believe. Unbelievable
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It's not hard to find various computer laptop reliability ratings. The one I'm posting here is from Winter 2017 Consumer Reports, which would be the 2nd year of the butterfly design MBPs being on the market. In other words, the earlier designs that were supposedly worse than the 2018/2019 versions that had the membrane added. The estimated breakage rate for Apple laptops at that time was 10% for two years of ownership.

www.zdnet.com

Consumer Reports pulls recommended ratings on Microsoft Surface laptops based on reliability scores

The move is a hit to Microsoft's hardware business -- and many of the reliability problems appear to be software related.
www.zdnet.com www.zdnet.com

And here's another Consumer Reports reliability rating from 2015, which is before the MBP had the butterfly mechanism. The estimated breakage rate for three years of ownership is 10%.

www.consumerreports.org

Survey Results: The Most Reliable Laptops - Consumer Reports

Looking for the most reliable laptops? Consumer Reports' latest survey reveals which brands sell the longest-lasting models, and when it makes sense to buy an extended warranty.
www.consumerreports.org www.consumerreports.org

And here's a PC Magazine 2018 Reader's Choice Award article. Apple had the top score for laptops and was rated as a 9.1 for reliability.

www.pcmag.com

Readers' Choice Awards 2018: Laptops and Desktops

Even in a smartphone world, you can't live without your personal computer. These brands are the right brands to pick.
www.pcmag.com www.pcmag.com
 
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*slow hand clap for Apple.

What took them so long? They made 'richgravy' off all the people they sold that sub par design to.

Glad I didn't buy it. Hard on the finger tips and very noisy.

Azrael.
 
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It may be dead, but we're stuck with the corpses for a few years still. I bought a MBP in July 2019, I might change it in 4 years ideally... But my keys already have problems once in a while.
Love the texture, the feeling of the keys, but reliability is more important.
 
I am really happy with the butterfly keyboard on my 2018 13" MacBook Pro. I am worried though that it can break at some point and I would prefer to have a more reliable keyboard. The Magic Keyboard is good, but this is not a reason for me to upgrade to the newest MacBook Pro..
 
gnipgnop said:
It's not hard to find various computer laptop reliability ratings. The one I'm posting here is from Winter 2017 Consumer Reports, which would be the 2nd year of the butterfly design MBPs being on the market. In other words, the earlier designs that were supposedly worse than the 2018/2019 versions that had the membrane added. The estimated breakage rate for Apple laptops at that time was 10% for two years of ownership.

www.zdnet.com

Consumer Reports pulls recommended ratings on Microsoft Surface laptops based on reliability scores

The move is a hit to Microsoft's hardware business -- and many of the reliability problems appear to be software related.
www.zdnet.com www.zdnet.com
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Did you read your own reference? It states:

These conclusions are based on our breakage rate estimates for laptops by the end of the 2nd year of ownership, gathered from subscribers' experiences with 41,304 laptops purchased new between 2014 and the first quarter of 2017.

That being said I believe the first butterfly mechanism MacBooks were released in late 2016 and updated in mid 2017 so your referenced study would reflect mostly scissor mech MacBooks from 2014 thru the release of the first butterfly in late 2016.
 
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gnipgnop said:
And here's a PC Magazine 2018 Reader's Choice Award article. Apple had the top score for laptops and was rated as a 9.1 for reliability.

www.pcmag.com

Readers' Choice Awards 2018: Laptops and Desktops

Even in a smartphone world, you can't live without your personal computer. These brands are the right brands to pick.
www.pcmag.com www.pcmag.com
Click to expand...

You quoted this reference as a "reliability" rating and it was not, reliability was a subset, it was a Readers Choice award rating, there is a difference! Rating your brand new laptop is not really indicative of your opinion 2-3 years down the road, you seem to be cherry picking. Furthermore the article/study was published in Feb 2018, so what model year laptops did it encompass? It is titled best of 2018 but was released in Feb 2018? Sounds like best of 2017 to me.

I like my 2017 laptop, its keyboard is a dumpster fire, replaced twice and starting to act up again.
 
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Hey, thanks for at least trying something new. But a bigger thanks is FINALLY admitting it wasn't working out and going back to tried-and-true technology. It just took them longer than it should have to get to that realization.
 
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FightTheFuture said:
It cost them $700 each repair. I don't think they came out of this with comfortable margins.
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$700 retail, not $700 repair. I’m sure when you order millions, the cost Apple pays for each top case with built in battery is no where near $700. They track this stuff internally and they obviously were spending too much on warranty repairs to justify shipping flawed products hence the redesign.

If the failure rate was so low and inline with other normal failure rates then they wouldn’t have spent R&D to make a new scissor keyboard.
 
joelhinch said:
You won’t be missed.
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Thank goodness. Too bad I got a 2017. It hasn’t given out but one time It wasn’t working correctly and I had to use an air compressor to fix it. I don’t use my Mac too much so that’s probably why I haven’t had big problems with this one unlike my 2016 macbook where the keyboard stopped working.
 
Rogifan said:
No. One person does not make a decision like that. Designers at Apple don’t birth products all on their own. There’s thousands of product and manufacturing engineers that help bring products to life. And product marketing which is involved in what products to make and what feature set they should have. One person alone did not design and build the butterfly keyboard and decide to put it in all of Apple’s laptops.

i don’t think the company continued to manufacture and sell a defective product because of someone’s ego. Tim Cook doesn‘t care about egos. More likely they were wedded to specific product schedules/roadmaps and chose not to disrupt them when they probably should have. It’s not like there was a huge drop off in Mac sales over the last 4-5 years. If anything Macs are selling better than ever. For all we know the data Apple had didn’t show the intense dislike for the keyboard that certain parts of the internet did.
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I'm guessing that there was one person (who probably had a little too much power within the company) who kept pounding his fist on the conference room table to keep this thing. Once that person left the company, they were able to finally move on and get rid of it. I've seen stuff like this happen before.
 
There is no doubt that the butterfly keyboard had reliability issues. Otherwise, Apple would not have moved away from it. I do believe that the latter BF keyboards were better than the early batch, and Apple did make improvements over the 4 year run. Personally, I have never had an issue with my 2019 MBA, which is over 9 month old. Also, the 4 year warranty provided me with some peace of mind in case I had a problem.

Frankly, I thought Apple would go another couple of years using the BF KB on the MBA before changing. I was wrong. Apple clearly felt they needed to make a change across their line-up. We will never really know exactly how the reliability of the BF KB compared to traditional KBs. Failure rates and the cost of replacing warranty KBs must have played into Apple's decision. Also, there are probably economies of scale moving to one standard KB design. Finally, the early BF KBs had so many problems that the design was probably never going to shake it's bad reputation.
 
I'm a professional writer. I have a 2018 Air and have put thousands and thousands of words through the thing, and the keyboard just keeps on working. I like this keyboard because it takes very little effort to push the keys, and because of that, I can type faster than I've ever been able to type on any other keyboard, including past MacBook keyboards. I'm sure there are some reliability issues with this keyboard, but I've got a free-from-Apple four-year warranty on it, so I really don't care. So to those who say this keyboard is junk, for you it may be, but for me, it's been a joy to use. I'm kind of bummed it's going away. But hey, refurbs will be around for a while, right?
 
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joeswamp said:
I'm guessing that there was one person (who probably had a little too much power within the company) who kept pounding his fist on the conference room table to keep this thing. Once that person left the company, they were able to finally move on and get rid of it. I've seen stuff like this happen before.
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But it makes no sense. Especially for someone who these same people claim had one foot out the door just focusing on Apple Park and retail stores. If he had one foot out the door it’s unlikely he was focused on what keyboard was used in Mac laptops.
 
ouimetnick said:
Another quality Jony Ive innovation. He had a good run as well😂
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I chuckled when I read this. But he really did have a (mostly) good run! I mean he ****ed us in his final few years with a lot of god-awful designs, but up until about 2015 he was in a class all his own in the industry. I wonder what happened?
 
Honestly, the best thing that Apple has done since Apple Watch. Now please fix those horrible thermals and I'll buy Mac again.
 
gnipgnop said:
The laptops from the butterfly era were more reliable overall than the older scissor design models.
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Nonsense. They were not more reliable. The early butterfly keyboards (before the "key condoms" were added) were particularly terrible.

I say this as someone who likes the butterfly keyboards in many ways - but reliable? no.
 
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Only Apple really knows the reliability rate, but I have to say that I don't remember reading about other laptops with keyboard issues. I have been lucky maybe and my keyboard is working great. When the butterfly keyboard works, it feels great and I love it.
 
To anyone who still thinks the butterfly keyboard is still the best, Apple disagrees:

"The new Magic Keyboard features a refined scissor mechanism with 1 millimetre of travel, delivering the best typing experience ever on a Mac notebook" - https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/

So there you have it fanbois, Apple says the scissor keyboard is the best, so you had better jump into line, or hand in your fanboi badge.
 
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