Problems with MacBook butterfly switch keyboards
The best kind of controversial Apple design is one that people grumble about because it&#x27;s ahead of its time, but which ultimately replaces one way of doing things with another that&#x27;s better for most use cases. See: ditching floppies and adopting USB on the first iMac.<p>The worst kind of controversial Apple design is one that people grumble about because it&#x27;s aesthetically pleasing but actually makes the product less user-friendly. See: the hockey-puck mouse on the first iMac.<p>Regarding that second kind, sometimes Apple recognizes their mistake and, in a future iteration, completely replaces the bad design with a better one. More recently, they seem too infatuated with their initial design decisions and just keep putting band-aids on fundamentally flawed implementations. The butterfly keyboard mentioned in TFA is on its third(!) revision, and it&#x27;s still clearly flawed. Another example: Apple &quot;fixed&quot; the impossible-to-tell-in-the-dark-which-way-you&#x27;re holding-it Apple TV remote by putting a single tactile ring around one button, rather than just designing an ergonomic remote that makes it tougher for you to accidentally engage the touchpad and cancel out of the movie you&#x27;re watching.<p>So why might Apple underestimate the severity of bad design decisions?<p>Apple&#x27;s direction with the Mac lineup as of late is a great example of &quot;success hides problems.&quot; [1] Supposedly, the 2016 MacBook Pros sold very well, despite a number of bad design choices that put form over function:<p>- The keyboard design as described in TFA<p>- The touch bar (only available on the high end models). The designer must have really hated those useless, ugly fkeys. But instead of putting the touch bar above the fkeys, they eliminated them. The touch bar is not a substitute, unless all you used the fkeys for was changing volume, etc.<p>- Eliminated all other ports in favor of USB-C, which while great in theory is in fact a highly fragmented incompatible ecosystem of poor quality peripherals and cables that don&#x27;t give the user any visual indicator as to whether they work together. [2]<p>IMHO, many if not most of these MacBook Pro customers are buying not because of these bad design decisions but in spite of them. Computers are amazing because they&#x27;re fun and powerful general purpose machines. These machines may meet some subset of people&#x27;s needs better than the old ones did. But in exchange for that, they&#x27;ve stopped (or soon will stop) meeting the needs of many, many more.<p>Somebody once said &quot;design is how it works.&quot; If you live in a sterile white world where there&#x27;s no dust and you never plug anything into your laptop, maybe this product works for you. The rest of us don&#x27;t have that luxury.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=success+hides+problems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=success+hides+problems</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marco.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;14&#x2F;impossible-dream-of-usb-c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marco.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;14&#x2F;impossible-dream-of-usb-c</a>