The MacBook keyboard fiasco is way worse than Apple thinks
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“Apple keep insisting that only a ‘small number of customers have problems’ with the MacBook keyboards. That’s bollocks,” David Heinemeier Hansson writes for Signal v. Noise.This is a huge issue, it’s getting worse not better, and Apple is missing the forest for the trees.”
“Here’s some anecdata for Apple. I sampled the people at Basecamp. Out of the 47 people using MacBooks at the company, a staggering 30% are dealing with keyboard issues right now!! And that’s just the people dealing with current keyboard issues,” Hansson writes. “If you include all the people who used to have issues, but went through a repair or replacement process, the number would be even higher. Worth noting here is that the 3rd generation membrane keyboard did nothing to fix the issues. Six out of thirteen – nearly half!! – of the 2018+ MacBooks we have at the company have a failed keyboard.”
“This is a disaster. A complete unmitigated disaster,” Hansson writes. “But as always, in a time of crisis, the event itself is less indicative of the health of a company than the response. Is Apple going to accept that they’re currently alienating and undermining decades of goodwill by shipping broken computers in mass quantities?”
The butterfly keyboard is but one manifestation of Apple’s issues. The AirPower fiasco (printed on AirPods boxes no less) is another. Five+ years and counting with a dead-end goofball design on sale as the company’s flagship Mac, yet another. Need we go on? There have been many easily avoidable screwups over the years and, until the root cause is fixed — this stems from the very top with misplaced priorities and conflict aversion, to name just two biggies — these snafus will likely continue, further eroding Apple’s brand in the process.
Incessant virtue-signaling can hide systemic mismanagement for a time, but not forever.
