MacBook Pro keyboard
It started in August 2004 when I bought my first Apple product - a green iPod mini. Boy was it somethin’ special. Things spiralled somewhat from there. I have since purchased - with my own money - two Mac minis, two iMacs, at least three MacBook Pros, an iPod nano, an iPod touch, a Thunderbolt Display, half-a-dozen different iPhones, several keyboards, mice, and trackpads, and to hammer home a point, I even bought the Apple Battery Charger. Yes, that was a thing.
I’ve also owned an iBook G4, a PowerBook G4, an iPad, and a couple of Apple TVs. Oh and I used a noisy Power Mac G5 for a while at work back in the mid-2000’s.
Plus software, dongles, AppleCare, iTunes purchases.
And I’ve converted friends and family.
Well, you get the picture.
But I am pissed at Apple right now, and I’m feeling a bit dumb for letting myself becoming such a locked-in fanboi. To nobody’s shock, it’s the current MacBook Pro keyboard that may well prove to be a tipping point for me. I’ve used two of the fourth generation models as my daily drivers now - a 13-inch 2016 model, and the current 2018 13-inch model. The 2016 is still being used daily by my partner and it’s just started developing keyboard issues. The 2018 model, which I use to earn my living, has already had it’s keyboard replaced once and the “E” key on the replacement has just started to act up.
Now getting worked up about a few dodgy keys over the space of 15 years might seem a bit dramatic, but Apple have been making keyboards for a really long time. And the thing is, the keyboard I’m typing this on right now is Apple’s second or third attempt at fixing this style of keyboard. There’s absolutely no way Apple engineers didn’t know this keyboard was junk when they launched it over two years ago, yet they’re still delivering it to their pro customers with fixed-not-fixed solutions.
As a self-employed software developer I can’t afford to be without my computer for a few days while Apple replace a dud keyboard with another dud keyboard (again), so the whole experience has got me wondering: