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Earlier this week, Apple quietly announced—via a press release and a conference call with the media—an update to its MacBook Pro notebook line with faster 8th- and 9th-generation Intel Core processors, bringing for the first time eight cores to the MacBook Pro.
According to the Cupertino-based company, this "fastest Mac notebook ever" delivers twice the performance over the previous generation quad-core MacBook Pro and 40% more performance than a six-core version.
Yet, this kind of performance doesn’t come cheap: The price of the updated 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and 15-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,800 and $2,400 respectively. To be fair, this is the same base price than last year's models.
More surreptitiously, however, Apple quietly made changes again to the keyboard design—this is the 4th generation of Apple’s “butterfly” keyboard—of its latest MacBook Pro in order to make it even more resistant to small particles and dust entering under the keycaps and jamming the butterfly mechanism.
According to repair experts iFixit, what Apple changed was the material of the key's spring metal dome and the film—from plastic to nylon—that covers it.
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Would that be enough?
Of course and despite that it's taking Apple over 4 years—and counting—to figure what's really causing its keyboards to fail, time will tell.
But here's a clue that even Apple engineers still have no idea that this latest tweak will actually solve the butterfly keyboard issue—probably one of Apple's worst invention.
Alongside the announcement of the new MacBook Pro line, Apple also expanded its Keyboard Service Program to all MacBooks with the "butterfly" keyboard, whether the laptop is in or out of warranty.
The tech giant has determined that only a small percentage of the keyboards in certain MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models may exhibit one or more of the following behaviors:
- Letters or characters repeat unexpectedly
- Letters or characters do not appear
- Key(s) feel "sticky" or do not respond in a consistent manner
The repair program covers all the eligible models below for 4 years after they were first purchased from a retailer (Apple, Best Buy, Amazon...).
- MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015)
- MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2016)
- MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, 2017)
- MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2018)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016, Two Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Two Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
- MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016)
- MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
- MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
- MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019)
My very first impression when I heard the news was that, although I had no problem so far with my three-year-old MacBook's butterfly keyboard, I'm happy it's still covered until next January. Just in case.
However, I also found quite striking that this week's MacBook Pro was also included on the keyboard repair list, making me wonder if Apple engineers themselves believed that their latest tweaks will be enough to do the trick. Apparently not.
A solution in search of a problem
But the real problem of the butterfly keyboard, which Apple claims is providing four times more key stability than a traditional "scissor" mechanism, is that it's a solution in search of a problem: The previous "scissor" keyboards worked perfectly fine.
Yes, the new butterfly keys are flatter, have a short half-millimeter key travel—the distance from the key at rest until it hits bottom—which is on average about 1 to 2 millimeters shorter than other keyboards: This might be a real advantage in the case of the ultrathin MacBook but it doesn't really make sense for the thicker MacBook Pro.
So here are our 2 recommendations for Apple:
- Apple should get rid of the butterfly keyboard on the MacBook Pro line and bring back the tradition scissor mechanism
- But, more importantly, Apple should rethink the design of the MacBook Pro to make the keyboard easier to repair and replace : If that was the case from the beginning, the backlash around the keyboard design would probably not have been that severe
