(Thanks stupidly pointless Touch Bar!) It has also somehow nearly delivered an ‘I’m not interested’ auto-response to a stranger who wrote me at length on LinkedIn to thoughtfully thank me for an earlier article. This demonic keyboard has summoned Siri unasked.

I’ve only had this Oath-issued 2017 MacBook Pro (in long-held-off exchange for my trusty MacBook Air, whose admittedly grimy and paint-worn keys were nonetheless 100% functional after years of writerly service) for about a month but the keys appear to have a will of their own, whipping themselves into a possessive frenzy almost every time they’re pressed, and spewing out all manner of odd typos, mis-strikes and mistakes. But that would have an obvious impact on your ability to work by slowing down your ability to write. I guess you could type really slowly to try to avoid making all these high-speed typos.

You can’t press keys on a keyboard radically differently. It’s shockingly bad.Īs design snafus go, this is up there with antenna-gate. Instead, Apple has made a keyboard for making audible typos. Several colleagues have garnered dagger glances and been told to dial it down at conferences on account of all the key clattering as they worked. (Or, well, Apple designers got to overindulge their blue-sky thinking around the idea that ‘in space no one can hear you type’.) It’s like mobile phone keyclicks suddenly got dizzingly back in fashion. Because, as I say, the act of using the keyboard results in audible clackclackery. Yes, just a bit of dust! Move over ‘the princess and the pea’: Apple and the dust mote is here! ‘Just use it in a vacuum’ shouldn’t be an acceptable usability requirement for a very expensive laptop.Īpple has also had to make these keyboards quieter.

The redesigned mechanism has resulted in keys that not only feel different when pressed vs the prior MacBook keyboard - which was more spongey for sure but that meant keys were at reduced risk of generating accidental strikes vs their barely-there trigger-sensitive replacements (which feel like they have a 40% smaller margin for keystrike error) - but have also turned out to be fail prone, as particles of dust can find their way in between the keys, as dust is wont to do, and mess with the smooth functioning of key presses - requiring an official Apple repair.

New macbook pro keyboard hurts fingers