That was the most frustrating part about reading HN while working at Apple. Changing something like the touch-bar or keyboard are things that take enormous amount of redesign and engineering from both the product and manufacturing standpoint which take time.
Oh, dear, engineering people have to do engineering. The horrors.
The "broken" four years of Apple laptops (2016 to 2019) were quite a bit more frustrating to users.
- The keyboard was prone to failure at entering text - "You Had One Job!" This was an amazingly bad reversion to... I don't even know when, actually. People love and hate various styles of laptop keyboards, but it was exceedingly rare to hear that a keyboard fundamentally didn't function as a keyboard after some time of use. Ive's (I assume, given his known preferences) pursuit of Thin Uber Alles led to a fundamentally broken keyboard. Ok, not a huge issue if the keyboard is a cheap and easy fix, but...
- The keyboard was so integrated into the top case that the whole thing was unrepairable without literally replacing the whole top case, track pad, battery, etc. IIRC it was around $700 out of warranty, and while Apple kept extending out the keyboard repair issue window for a while, it doesn't change the fact that it was both disruptive for users and, apparently, quite expensive to Apple.
When I got a lightly used mid-2015 MBP in 2018 or so (oddly, the base model was still being made quite a while after it had been "replaced" in the consumer lineup), I figured it would be my last Apple laptop, because the replacements were clearly broken, and after three or four years of it, it was clear that the direction was set, and that you were typing on it wrong, or something of the sort.
I'm exceedingly glad to see that with the departure of Ive, some engineering sanity has returned to Apple, and the freshly redesigned M1 {Max,Pro} laptops seem to be a reversion to "That Which Works." A more standard keyboard actuation, and actual ports on the side. Woah...
Unfortunately, that said, I'm no longer using Apple products at the moment because the whole CSAM thing, on top of bowing to China regarding iCloud, and the questionable labor ethics involved have driven me off. I'm glad to see they're addressing repairability and such, but it was painful enough to rip myself free of that ecosystem (I'm currently using a Flip IV phone, a PineBook Pro, and some Kobos as my general use hardware - yes, they all have a lot of sharp edges) that I don't want to really dive back in unless I'm confident I won't have to exit it again in the near future. With the on-device scanning, in particular, "Well... we're delaying it... for a while..." is a very different claim from "Yeah, sorry, that was a bad idea and we're not going to do it." The second would be useful, the first implies that they're waiting until either a few more issues are resolved, or until people simply forget about the objections. Or it could imply that they're planning on the second, but just don't want to say it for some reason. I have no way of knowing.
It's been interesting, though. I so very badly want one of the M1 Max laptops, as it's literally everything I was looking for in a laptop, just... anymore, I'm too hesitant about Apple to actually buy one. And the alternatives for little ARM laptops all mostly suck... oh well. I didn't need to do high performance compute anyway.
I swear my Pinebook Pro has drawn more blood than any other computer device I've ever opened. You'd think I'd learn to be more careful after the third time the bottom shell sliced my finger open.
You can have working deep sleep, or audio that resumes after sleep. I've got a kernel patch that improves the state of that (the audio codec literally has no sleep/wake function in the 5.7/5.8 kernel), but I haven't applied it to the 5.8 kernel I run, so audio is... just broken.
Wifi works. Except when it doesn't. There's an issue with the firmware involving country codes and some 5Ghz frequencies, and I've not had the patience to track it down. Sometimes after sleep, wifi is just gone until a reboot.
The Kobos are fine, other than some random lag and reboots if you ask them to do too much. Large PDFs will choke an Aura badly.
The Flip IV... works, mostly, if you're not too picky, and don't care about things like seeing who all is in a group text. It's not unusable, but neither is it nice.
Etc.
The PBP has some legitimately sharp edges physically, though, too.
Because that's not how these systems work. Did the new keyboard allow for a flatter design to allow for more battery life?
Apple has always tried to improve computing. I've had MacBooks from the nineties and the keyboards on those are large and heavy. Is that where they should have stop with laptop design?
Did the new keyboard allow for a flatter design to allow for more battery life?
All it did was to increase Apple's repair cost because they had to support repairing these keyboards for many years.
> Apple has always tried to improve computing.
Then why go backwards with a bad keyboard, removing the Escape Key etc. Apple is not a scrappy startup where they don't have a team to test and give feedback.
