The butterfly keyboard will soon leave with the back of Apple’s former design director, Jony Ive.
Four years ago, Apple introduced a new button design, the butterfly structure, in the notebook MacBook product line. It brought a two-pole user experience and brought a class action lawsuit against Apple, which made Apple bow down and apologize for free maintenance. Now this design may have completely disappeared.
Apple analyst Guo Minghao wrote in a new investor report that Apple plans to switch its entire MacBook line to a scissor mechanical keyboard starting in 2020. This design not only improves the performance and reliability of the keyboard, but also increases the travel of each individual button, and is more durable and not easily damaged by high temperature and dust. The newly designed MacBook model will arrive in the second quarter of 2020.
If the prediction is reliable, it means that the butterfly keyboard will soon leave with the back of Apple’s former design director Jony Ive. In the past four years, the trouble it has brought has never stopped.
Professional Apple blogger John Gruber once wrote that “The butterfly keyboard is the worst design in Apple’s history. Macbooks should have the best keyboard in the industry, but on the contrary, their keyboards are actually the worst. The butterfly keyboard has caused permanent damage to the Macbook brand.”
According to Apple, the butterfly design can reduce keyboard thickness by 40% while improving accuracy. With the help of this design, Apple did come up with a thinner and lighter laptop than a few years ago.
Left is the traditional X-key structure, right is the butterfly structure
But the problems it brings are also constant. Because the butterfly keyboard seems to be more susceptible to failure due to ash. The technology blog AppleInsider has compiled the data of the American genius bar that has cooperated with it, and found that compared with the original two-year style, the two-generation MacBook Pro keyboard repair rate in 2016 and 2017 is high, and the repetition rate is also more. high.
In 2018, in California, the two sponsors represented all MacBooks that suffered a butterfly keyboard failure.The family initiated a class action lawsuit against Apple. The US technology website Change.org also launched a petition calling on Apple to recall all MacBooks with butterfly keyboards and said the hardware design is flawed. The petition received 17,000 signature support in a week.
In June of the same year, Apple rarely publicly apologized, acknowledging that some users of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops in 2016-2017 encountered keyboard problems when using earlier versions of the Butterfly Switch and offered an extended warranty to four years. solution.
After that, Apple tried to add a protective layer under the keycap of the 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard to prevent dust and debris from entering the core and affecting keyboard sensitivity. But the problem has not been solved.
In March of this year, Wall Street Journal author Joanna Stern wrote an article on the 2018 MacBook to show the keyboard flaws. The first half of the article is missing the letter E and the letter R. All the E in the middle will appear twice. All Ts in the back will appear twice. In this way, Joanna Stern shows how awkward it is to type with a faulty keyboard—sometimes “missing words” and sometimes “displaying twice”.
The departure of Jony Ive, the hero and designer of many of Apple’s product lines, was interpreted by various voices. One of them thought that his excessive pursuit of the thin and light shape of the product hurt the quality of the product. The appearance of the butterfly keyboard is proof. Anyway, Jony Ive has left, and now it’s the butterfly keyboard.
Source of the title: visualhunt