...
Here is an excerpt:
"The fear with the new keyboard design for some is that it may be worse than before. ...
But, the point is this; butterfly or Magic Keyboard, people are going to complain about the design no matter what, simply because it's different."
Nah. Not buying it. Keyboards are a known, commodity technology. Dozens of companies are able to make perfectly good keyboards that nobody hates. I mean, hell, Apple was able to make good keyboards that nobody hated for decades.
I think it probably didn't even occur to anybody that a major company could screw up making a keyboard until Apple did exactly that in 2015.
So no, the default is not that everybody will hate any new keyboard that Apple makes. Apparently everybody loves the new 16" MBP keyboard so far. There's no reason to expect it to be bad, no reason to assume it would be bad, and no reason to assume that a lot of people are going to complain about it.
As for people not liking the Magic keyboard, I don't have any experience with it. I did some googling and can't find any widespread hate towards that keyboard. It has a very high review average on Amazon. It has a poor review average on Apple.com but the people who give it bad reviews complain about stuff other than the key switches--that keys are in places they don't like, or that Bluetooth doesn't work right, or that it bends, etc. etc. but I don't see any complaints about the switches. So no, since there doesn't seem to be any widespread hatred towards the Magic keyboard I wouldn't assume there would be hatred towards the new laptop keyboard. And plus, just because Apple is calling the new laptop keyboard a "Magic" keyboard doesn't mean it's really even necessarily very similar to the desktop product called a "Magic" keyboard.
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I understand your reluctance to buy the current MBA, but there is no guarantee that a scissor keyboard will be better than the current generation butterfly keyboard.
There are now dozens of reviews of the 16" MBP online and everybody seems to agree that the new keyboard is much better. So no, there's no guarantee, but the evidence so far sure seems to point that way.
Also, I believe Apple has improved the reliability of the butterfly keyboard with the latest iterations.
You keep mentioning the improved reliability of the butterfly keyboard. I'm absolutely certain they improved the reliability. But that means nothing quantitatively. You can
improve the reliability of a s**t product but that doesn't necessarily make it a reliable product. I'm sure the reliability of Trabants was improved over the course of its manufacturing run but that doesn't mean they're reliable cars.
Nevertheless, independent of reliability, if you don't like the feel of the butterfly keyboard, then don't get a MacBook that has one.
That's a tough one. I was pretty sure I could get used to the keyboard since millions of other people seem to have been able to do so, but after a week, it's still driving me nuts. So it's hard to tell somebody to avoid buying a laptop if they don't know whether or not they'll like the keyboard, or they assume they'll get used to the keyboard. (BTW, this is the first keyboard I've ever bought where I had to think "just keep using it and maybe you'll get used to it.")
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I wouldn't take much of what Phil Schiller says all that seriously right now. They're claiming to be developing the two keyboards in parallel, but they have to say that. If they say "yeah, we only want to do the new keyboard now", it would crater the sales of all the butterfly devices going into holiday season. As an officer of Apple he simply cannot do that.
Well, the other option would have been to release all the refreshes simultaneously, then they just have to suffer through 2 weeks of returns by people who had just bought the versions with the old keyboards and they're done with it. Sadly they didn't go with that option.
I'm pretty jazzed that I only bought my laptop last week and it's still within the return window. I'd be kicking myself if I heard this news and couldn't return the new laptop.