Over the past few months, Apple’s MacBook Pro has slowly but surely become one of Apple’s more controversial products. Though Apple’s venerable notebook brings a lot to the table, the machine boasts a number of design decisions that — taken together — have sparked a seemingly endless amount of criticism.
Aside from the fact that many people find the Touch Bar to be intriguing but not altogether useful, and aside from the fact that the MacBook Pro can’t support 32GB of RAM, the most damning aspect of Apple’s pro-level notebook is that the keyboard is simply unreliable.
Since hitting store shelves, there have been no shortage of stories detailing how the MacBook Pro’s new butterfly keyboard is extremely temperamental and, in turn, dreadfully unreliable. Specifically, many users have noticed that certain keys will stop working entirely if even a tiny spec of dust manages to lodge itself underneath the keyboard. Just this week, AppleInsiderrevealed that Apple’s new MacBook Pro models are twice as likely to experience keyboard malfunctions than older models which sport the traditional scissor switch keyboard design.
With complaints surrounding the MacBook Pro keyboard growing, a new petition on Change.org which labels Apple’s top of the line notebook a “design failure” has started to amass hundreds of signatures.
The petition, which calls on Apple to recall existing MacBook Pro models, reads in part:
Apple, it’s time: recall every MacBook Pro released since Late 2016, and replace the keyboards on all of them with new, redesigned keyboards that just work.
Because, these keyboards don’t work.
Every one of Apple’s current-gen MacBook Pro models, 13″ and 15″, is sold with a keyboard that can become defective at any moment due to a design failure.
The problems are widespread, consistent, and infuriating.
The petition also includes a number of excerpts about the error-prone keyboard design from industry observers, including the following from Jason Snell: “… Apple’s relative silence on this issue for existing customers is deafening. If these problems are remotely as common as they seem to be, this is an altogether defective product that should be recalled.”
A recall is of course extremely unlikely, but as Snell alludes to above, Apple’s decision to keep quiet on the issue is far from encouraging.
