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Class Action Suit Filed Against Apple Over the Keyboards in MacBook Pro and MacBook Laptops (theoutline.com)
On Friday, Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit over the butterfly-switch keyboards, found on the current generation MacBook Pro and MacBook lineups, that have plagued its customers since they were released in 2015. The suit, filed in the Northern District Court of California, alleges that Apple "promoted and sold laptops it knew were defective in that they contain a keyboard that is substantially certain to fail prematurely," The Outline reports, and that selling these computers not only directly to its customers but also to third party retailers constitutes a violation of good faith. From the report: The Outline was the first outlet to substantially cover the magnitude of the issue, writing that Apple Geniuses responsible for diagnosing and repairing these Apple computers would benevolently attribute dead keys and double-spacing spacebars to a "piece of dust" stuck under the keyboard. Under Apple's warranty, Geniuses might offer to replace the entire top case of the computer, a process that takes about a week. Out of warranty, it costs about $700 to replace this part on a MacBook Pro. Apple has declined repeatedly to comment on the issue, but directs sufferers to a support page that instructs users how to tilt the computer at an angle, blow canned air under the malfunctioning keys, light candles arranged in the shape of a pentagram, and recite an incantation to Gaia in hopes of fixing their machines. Earlier this month, users kickstarted a petition on Change.org that calls on Apple to recall MacBook Pro units released since late 2016 over the defective keyboard. The petition has garnered about 20,000 signatures. Widely respected iOS developer and Apple commentator Marco Arment tweeted on the news, "We can't know for sure that Apple knew the 2016 keyboards were defective and sold them anyway. But it's hard to see how they couldn't have known. They were released 18 months earlier in the 12" MacBook, and those had the same problems with high failure rates from the start."
Posting as AC because I work as an Apple service tech during the day.
These systems are probably the worst computers Apple has ever produced. The failure rate on them is astoundingly bad- so bad in fact, that the shop I work for is thinking about getting out of the Apple repair business just because we can't adequately support our customers when servicing these machines. We want to, but our hands are completely tied. It's a crap shoot if we can even get new chassis in stock these days (the keyboard is riveted to the lower chassis, which also contains the non-removable battery pack and a few other components). More and more we've been having to send the entire machine into Apple for servicing, at which point they just send you back someone else's refurb (yes, really, this is becoming an extremely common occurrence when servicing any of their portables) and you get to go through the whole process again when that inevitably breaks.
We've been swamped with these machines to the point that it's been clogging up our service centre for other customers with different machines. On any given week, there's as few as 5 machines awaiting parts (or to be shipped to Apple) and as many as 12. It's usually the keyboard that fails- either one or more keys refuse to work properly, or in some cases we've seen the entire board go tits up and totally scramble the input of the keys (ie, C types Z, J becomes backspace, etc). Other failures include bad or cracked touch bars (don't ask me how these get shattered so often, people keep swearing that they opened up their system one day and it was cracked- I'm starting to think the glass is shattering under the thermal stress from being positioned near the hot end of the system) and logic board failures presumably due to overheated components (we can't perform board level service on these machines, but that hasn't stopped me from putting a few systems under a microscope and poking around- there's a few power related ICs that seem to love blowing up and killing the entire system).
All in all, I've never seen anything like it. Our owner is pissed off enough he's thinking about dropping Apple entirely and pushing our customers to convert. We do service PC laptops, but it's rare we see keyboard issues with those that can't be fixed in 15 minutes using a $30 replacement part. With the MBPs, it's a $900 CAD piece, and you can't just buy one from Apple- you have to go through GSX to requisition one and send back the old part after you've removed it (they REALLY don't want spare parts getting out onto the second hand market). But again, that's assuming they're even in stock. The last time I was able to order a lower chassis was three weeks ago, and we've had to ship in about two dozen systems since then (which won't come back for 1-2 weeks).
Anyways, if you want my professional opinion- stay away from these machines. They're defective by design and Apple is clearly buckling under the service load (we're seeing something similar with the iMac Pro as well). I don't know what the fuck they're smoking over there these days, but it's nothing good. A keyboard should not be an integral part of a computer like this. It should be easily removable and serviced without having to scrap half the chassis in the process. Apple fucked up big time here, and it's finally swinging around to bite them in the ass. They won't admit it though, it's more likely you'll see some reference to a vague repair program in a few months promising to fix "affected" machines (hint: they're all affected).
This. A thousand times, this. The mechanical parts of the keyboard are fine by comparison. No real problems, or at least none worse than my previous machines, which all occasionally had crumb problems (easily solved by massaging the key). But the touchbar? The touch bar needs to die in a fire. It is a perfect example of what SJ meant when he said that his most important job was saying no. Someone else should have said it, but apparently, nobody did, and as a result, we have the single most flaky laptop in the history of computing, constantly doing things that the user did not expect, all because somebody thought, "Let's add touch to the Mac, but let's not do it with an actual touchscreen." F**king wankers.
My previous MacBook Pro, as much as the bad top speaker annoyed me, was a great machine until some dirtbag stole it out of my car in a church parking lot. Now, I have this touchbar travesty, and I'm not amused.
The touchbar is orders of magnitude too sensitive, to the point that it is almost completely and utterly useless. I would estimate that fewer than one percent of detected touchbar touches were intentional. The rest were accidental triggers. It's so bad that I've literally disabled all of the touchbar buttons except for screen brightness, escape, keyboard brightness, and volume, and even with a mostly-empty touchbar, I STILL trigger them accidentally enough to be annoying. On my work machine, I even disabled the volume controls, because I kept accidentally unmuting it in the office while typing, and then wondered why I kept hearing Mail playing sounds every time an email arrived.
My favorite touchbar hassle is its behavior in Finale, where I routinely have to hold down modifier keys while hitting numbers. The probability of accidentally touching the touchbar while doing that approaches 100%, and to make matters worse, there's an undocumented "feature" where if you hold down option and touch the touchbar, it opens System Preferences to the related pane (e.g. the Sound preferences pane if you option-touch the volume buttons). In theory, that sounds like a good idea. In practice, there have been days when I've launched System Preferences accidentally more than twenty times in a single editing session.
The touchbar is, to be frank, so bad that I would gladly PAY Apple to replace it with a normal keyboard. That option was never available in the 15" model, or else I would never have gotten a touchbar to begin with, because frankly, it seemed like a gimmick, and I use the escape key a lot... but before I bought it, I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined that it would be anywhere near as bad as it is. I expected the escape key to be a headache. I didn't expect to have to basically disable the whole d**n touchbar just to get any work done.
So what can be done to fix it? The most guaranteed-reliable fix would be to put touch sensors in the upper row of keys. If you're hovering over the upper row of keys, any touchbar touch is pretty much guaranteed to be an accident. You *might* be able to solve it by using pressure sensing, but the better solution from a touch perspective would be actually ensuring that the touch happens somewhere in the vicinity of the middle of the touch bar vertically, rather than near the bottom edge. If they made it ignore all touches in the bottom half of the strip, that would probably take care of most of the problems most of the time. That might even be possible to do in software.
What I don't understand is how the folks in Apple's upper management could have believed that this worked well enough to ship it. We use MacBook Pros at work, and out of my
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