Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

bearinthetown

macrumors 6502
May 5, 2018
287
333
How does development of a new keyboard require new software? It’s interesting what you’re saying.

Making a keyboard has always been easy. It’s Apple who made some people (including you) think otherwise. I agree that it could be challenging to fit a keyboard to a frame that thin, but don’t pretend keyboard is a rocket science. It’s still just the keybord. The only thing it does is registering key presses.

Being secretive is okay as long as it doesn’t mean disappointing customers. Apple knew perfectly their keyboards are crap. You said it yourself - extensive testing. With as faulty hardware as these keyboards are, there is no way Apple wasn’t conscious of that. And they know perfectly that faulty keyboard renders any computer useless, especially for professionals. Trying to defend Apple in this case is ridiculous.
 

AustinIllini

macrumors G5
Oct 20, 2011
12,700
10,567
Austin, TX
How does development of a new keyboard require new software? It’s interesting what you’re saying.
Kind of an odd thing to point out. I'm guessing a new keyboard requires new firmware hooks.

Making a keyboard has always been easy. It’s Apple who made some people (including you) think otherwise. I agree that it could be challenging to fit a keyboard to a frame that thin, but don’t pretend keyboard is a rocket science. It’s still just the keybord. The only thing it does is registering key presses.
So you're saying it's easy but it's not easy. Got it.

Being secretive is okay as long as it doesn’t mean disappointing customers. Apple knew perfectly their keyboards are crap. You said it yourself - extensive testing. With as faulty hardware as these keyboards are, there is no way Apple wasn’t conscious of that. And they know perfectly that faulty keyboard renders any computer useless, especially for professionals. Trying to defend Apple in this case is ridiculous.
There are reasons things like this get through, but I'm not sure it's worth explaining at this point because you probably won't understand it.

(sometimes test coverage doesn't properly cover excessive dust or excessive wear)
 

macjunk(ie)

macrumors 6502a
Aug 12, 2009
939
563
...

(sometimes test coverage doesn't properly cover excessive dust or excessive wear)

So are you implying that all cases of keyboard failure were due to excessive dust or wear?

I guess you need to have more of an open mind. Take a breath and think about it. You are a big company, having at your disposal the best engineering and testing teams - hordes of them. You release a laptop and let's assume that you tested this laptop in vacuum for the first time. A mistake, but lets give them a pass (although not deserving). But soon, you start to get reports of keyboard failure. You start investigating and try to determine why the issues were not caught. You try to reproduce the issue, capture engineering samples and use the findings to beef up your test cases for the keyboard.

Now, in year 2, you release an allegedly "improved" version of the keyboard. Within hours of usage, customers start finding the same problems. Now are you telling me, that Apple, with all its resources and talent, cannot find the bugs in their keyboards their customers find in a matter of hours?

What's more, the same story repeats in year 3 and year 4, and who knows perhaps year 5 as well if the new keyboard rumours don't pan out. You seriously can't think that Apple's engineers have failed to catch this issue every time they make "improvements" to the keyboard? I am not saying it is easy for them to know why the keyboard failed (or maybe it is, who knows?), but they will know very early on in the product cycle that the improvements don't help a lot either.

I don't know what's going on inside Apple but I guess this fiasco is because of some emotional product managers in Apple. They clearly know there are faults in the design but they still want to stick to it- maybe to prove a point? Maybe this keyboard is some team's (or someone's) brainchild and they wanted it to succeed desperately? It is not out of the realm cause people are emotional beings. It is at these times a good leader makes all the difference in the world; one who can step back and do what's right and not worry about saving face.

Apple's morality today is similar to my hairline - fast receding and soon, completely gone, leaving no trace of its existence.
 

Kung gu

Suspended
Oct 20, 2018
1,379
2,434
So are you implying that all cases of keyboard failure were due to excessive dust or wear?

I guess you need to have more of an open mind. Take a breath and think about it. You are a big company, having at your disposal the best engineering and testing teams - hordes of them. You release a laptop and let's assume that you tested this laptop in vacuum for the first time. A mistake, but lets give them a pass (although not deserving). But soon, you start to get reports of keyboard failure. You start investigating and try to determine why the issues were not caught. You try to reproduce the issue, capture engineering samples and use the findings to beef up your test cases for the keyboard.

Now, in year 2, you release an allegedly "improved" version of the keyboard. Within hours of usage, customers start finding the same problems. Now are you telling me, that Apple, with all its resources and talent, cannot find the bugs in their keyboards their customers find in a matter of hours?

What's more, the same story repeats in year 3 and year 4, and who knows perhaps year 5 as well if the new keyboard rumours don't pan out. You seriously can't think that Apple's engineers have failed to catch this issue every time they make "improvements" to the keyboard? I am not saying it is easy for them to know why the keyboard failed (or maybe it is, who knows?), but they will know very early on in the product cycle that the improvements don't help a lot either.

I don't know what's going on inside Apple but I guess this fiasco is because of some emotional product managers in Apple. They clearly know there are faults in the design but they still want to stick to it- maybe to prove a point? Maybe this keyboard is some team's (or someone's) brainchild and they wanted it to succeed desperately? It is not out of the realm cause people are emotional beings. It is at these times a good leader makes all the difference in the world; one who can step back and do what's right and not worry about saving face.

Apple's morality today is similar to my hairline - fast receding and soon, completely gone, leaving no trace of its existence.
i agree with u mostly but Apple is stuborn. Moral isn't the right word tp use. Name three IT companies with the same levwl of stores, support, and apple give out replacement programs on 4 year macbooks (mbp 2015). i have never seen any company doing this level of care on a 2015 product. i don't think dell, microsoft, hp and lenovo would give a **** on their products released in 2015. and before u say they don't any problems i am 100% sure all of them have reliability issues.
 

AustinIllini

macrumors G5
Oct 20, 2011
12,700
10,567
Austin, TX
i agree with u mostly but Apple is stuborn. Moral isn't the right word tp use. Name three IT companies with the same levwl of stores, support, and apple give out replacement programs on 4 year macbooks (mbp 2015). i have never seen any company doing this level of care on a 2015 product. i don't think dell, microsoft, hp and lenovo would give a **** on their products released in 2015. and before u say they don't any problems i am 100% sure all of them have reliability issues.
Find me a company that publicly announces issues with their hardware the way Apple does.

No one is willing to admit their product has issues until they're ready to improve.
[doublepost=1563419204][/doublepost]
Okay I feel like you are trolling at this point. It made me smile, I won’t lie. :)
At least when you're wrong you're consistently wrong.
 

Kung gu

Suspended
Oct 20, 2018
1,379
2,434
Find me a company that publicly announces issues with their hardware the way Apple does.

No one is willing to admit their product has issues until they're ready to improve.
[doublepost=1563419204][/doublepost]
At least when you're wrong you're consistently wrong.
no i meant that apple cares for their old products and i take that as a good thing, where as other pc companies don't care.
 

Kung gu

Suspended
Oct 20, 2018
1,379
2,434
Find me a company who screwed up such basic thing as the keyboard in the luxury price range.
u know apple is made of humans right and humans make mistakes, sometimes i wonder if consumers think of companies as some sort of machines that always have to get things right.

apples keyboard is not a "basic" keyboard, its a new mechanism that no company had tried before, yes the outputs seems as basic as a keyboard but the input is an engineering failure on apples part.
 

bearinthetown

macrumors 6502
May 5, 2018
287
333
u know apple is made of humans right and humans make mistakes, sometimes i wonder if consumers think of companies as some sort of machines that always have to get things right.

apples keyboard is not a "basic" keyboard, its a new mechanism that no company had tried before, yes the outputs seems as basic as a keyboard but the input is an engineering failure on apples part.
I don’t understand why people use this kind of excuses. Did I say Apple employees are robots? Your statement completely ignores the fact that introducing a product is a long process. If you think that they had no idea they are selling crappy product before selling the first unit, you are very naive. Nobody says they have no right for mistakes. But they do not have right to lie about their products and introduce such obvious and catastrophic flaws to the market.
 
  • Like
Reactions: macjunk(ie)

Kung gu

Suspended
Oct 20, 2018
1,379
2,434
i disagree on that part the macbook air 2018 logic board issue and the 2015 mbp have been made public without a lawsuit
[doublepost=1563445005][/doublepost]
I don’t understand why people use this kind of excuses. Did I say Apple employees are robots? Your statement completely ignores the fact that introducing a product is a long process. If you think that they had no idea they are selling crappy product before selling the first unit, you are very naive. Nobody says they have no right for mistakes. But they do not have right to lie about their products and introduce such obvious and catastrophic flaws to the market.
u make a fair point, apple should have known in their testing and suppose they have not, at least after the 2016 mbps were released they should removed them, that would have enabled to avoid the mess they now created
 

AustinIllini

macrumors G5
Oct 20, 2011
12,700
10,567
Austin, TX
Find me a company who screwed up such basic thing as the keyboard in the luxury price range.

So I guess this argument is over because you can’t answer my question.

Where are these companies publicly admitting their blunders?

(Literally every car company falls into that category you are describing. Every established company messes up and none of them admit it)
 

bearinthetown

macrumors 6502
May 5, 2018
287
333
i disagree on that part the macbook air 2018 logic board issue and the 2015 mbp have been made public without a lawsuit
[doublepost=1563445005][/doublepost]
u make a fair point, apple should have known in their testing and suppose they have not, at least after the 2016 mbps were released they should removed them, that would have enabled to avoid the mess they now created
How the heck wouldn’t they know? Keyboards are tested under various conditions, with thousands of key presses. It took my MacBook Air 2018 about 3 days to start misbehave with E key and I am pretty sterile around my computer. After replacement, the O key started to do the same thing after 2 days. And there are millions of people with this problem. If they didn’t test it properly, they are just idiots, but honestly I don’t believe they are. New keyboard system is too serious of a change. I’m pretty sure they worked on it, failed on it and just did that stunt of introducing it to the market, meanwhile working on some excuse.
 

Kung gu

Suspended
Oct 20, 2018
1,379
2,434
How the heck wouldn’t they know? Keyboards are tested under various conditions, with thousands of key presses. It took my MacBook Air 2018 about 3 days to start misbehave with E key and I am pretty sterile around my computer. After replacement, the O key started to do the same thing after 2 days. And there are millions of people with this problem. If they didn’t test it properly, they are just idiots, but honestly I don’t believe they are. New keyboard system is too serious of a change. I’m pretty sure they worked on it, failed on it and just did that stunt of introducing it to the market, meanwhile working on some excuse.
did samsung know that their Fold was gonna break in 2 days of use? No
[doublepost=1563445831][/doublepost]
did samsung know that their Fold was gonna break in 2 days of use? No
and i believe the only way to sort out this keyboard is a hardware redesign as the mbps were designed around the butterfly keyboard
 

bearinthetown

macrumors 6502
May 5, 2018
287
333
did samsung know that their Fold was gonna break in 2 days of use? No
Of course they did. Please, just please try to think realistically for a minute. You spend millions of dollars to create a new product. You don’t test it under extreme conditions? You are surprised that it fails after two days of normal usage? Just ignore the official statements, they mean nothing. There are people specialized in crafting the messages to cover up the real reasons.
 
  • Like
Reactions: myrtlebee

Kung gu

Suspended
Oct 20, 2018
1,379
2,434
Of course they did. Please, just please try to think realistically for a minute. You spend millions of dollars to create a new product. You don’t test it under extreme conditions? You are surprised that it fails after two days of normal usage? Just ignore the official statements, they mean nothing. There are people specialized in crafting the messages to cover up the real reasons.
its like if they knew it was going fail then why take the chance and risk bad press. sometimes i don't get these companies
 
  • Like
Reactions: myrtlebee

bearinthetown

macrumors 6502
May 5, 2018
287
333
I would guess they really wanted to be the first ones to introduce foldable phone. Just like Apple with their AirPower. They were too optimistic. Another factor is probably some kind of corpo mess, bad flow of information. This is where Apple has it better, because Apple spends millions to manipulate the masses, they have very large marketing department. In the end of the day, the risk wasn’t taken by Samsung luckily, at least they didn’t make people buy their crap.
 

sracer

macrumors G4
Apr 9, 2010
10,408
13,293
where hip is spoken
u know apple is made of humans right and humans make mistakes, sometimes i wonder if consumers think of companies as some sort of machines that always have to get things right.

apples keyboard is not a "basic" keyboard, its a new mechanism that no company had tried before, yes the outputs seems as basic as a keyboard but the input is an engineering failure on apples part.
Apple is not unique in that regard. Other computer companies try things that no other company has done before. Lenovo's watchband hinge is new that no company had tried before and they didn't need to try 3 times to fix it because it worked the first time.

I can't think of something that has failed as spectacularly as Apple's new keyboard that hasn't been resolved after 3 attempts. If you do, I'd like to know.

The cognitive dissonance between simultaneously thinking "Apple is unique" and "Apple is just like every other company" is pretty common.


its like if they knew it was going fail then why take the chance and risk bad press. sometimes i don't get these companies
There are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes that the average person doesn't know about. It is quite possible that Apple has contractually obligated one of their suppliers to produce "X" millions of those keyboards... usually the higher the volume, the lower the per-unit cost. If the design is flawed, then Apple is stuck with those keyboards for the duration of their contract.

They'll try things like silicon barriers, changing the material composition of the keyboard components (without changing the molds and dies), anything that will fall within their ability given contractual restrictions.

And if this is indeed the case, then keyboard replacement programs will help Apple burn through the number of keyboards they contracted for at a quicker rate. They can also write off (for tax purposes) those keyboards that needed replacing.

I don't know this as a fact. But given my experience in computer manufacturing, this is a very possible scenario.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jpn and macjunk(ie)
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.