Back in May, I talked about the scuttlebutt going around that Apple would be replacing the butterfly keyboards in MacBooks going forward with an everything-old-is-new-again scissor switch design.
Now, supply-chain exfiltrator extraordinaire, Kuo Ming-Chi, has some details. Text via MacRumors:
There have been successful developments in the new scissor keyboard. The new keyboard could improve the typing experience by offering longer key travel and durability by adopting glass fiber to reinforce the keys' structure.
This, allegedly, for a 2019 MacBook Air update.
If you're not up on your keyboard nomenclature, then scissor switches are the fairly standard mechanisms Apple used to use across their laptop lineups. At least prior to 2015 when they introduced their own, invented-at-Apple butterfly switches to the newly redesigned 12-inch MacBook, and then in 2016 with the new MacBook Pro and 2018 with the new MacBook Air.
We believe the partially refreshed MacBook Pro models will also adopt a new scissor keyboard in 2020; shipments of MacBook models equipped with a new scissor keyboard will grow 500–700% YoY in 2020. Though the butterfly keyboard is still thinner than the new scissor keyboard, we think most users can't tell the difference. Furthermore, the new scissor keyboard could offer a better user experience and benefit Apple's profits; therefore, we predict that the butterfly keyboard may finally disappear in the long term.
This part is a little harder to parse.
Apple released the all-new MacBook Air design last year, in October of 2018, but without a new keyboard design. Normally, swapping out keyboard designs is non-trivial, since they're machined down to the micro-millimeter so everything fits perfectly.
All new designs are expensive, though, both in terms of what it costs to ramp up production and to keep current customers from getting angry if you update too often, never mind not often enough.
Apple could just say frak-it, in Battlestar parlance, and go with two new models two years in a row, or it's also possible that, knowing the new keyboard design was coming but not yet quite arriving, they built the current chassis so that it'd be easier to transition to the new keyboard.
I find this kind of stuff so fascinating but we'll just have to wait and see.
Curiouser is the MacBook Pro.
It was previously rumored that Apple was coming out with an all new 16-inch MacBook Pro design this year, in 2019. How does that reconcile with what Kuo calls partially refreshed MacBook Pro models only getting the new scissor keyboards in 2020?
Does that mean, like the Air, Apple will release the new MacBook Pro first with the old keyboards this year and then refresh them again with the new keyboard next year?
Does it mean the new MacBook Pro's won't be coming at all until next year, and Kuo only considers them a partial refresh either way, war on bezels be damned?
Or does it mean he just forgot about the 16-inch for this report, like whoops, whoopsie?
Because as much as smaller bezels will be nice, I think it's safe to say the only thing everyone really wants from a new MacBook Pro is that new keyboard.
Much like nothing unreal exists, no unannounced Apple products exist, and the company can and will move things around as needed. So, until Phil or John Ternus or someone at Apple shows them off on stage, or slips them out in a press release, we're all just trying to read patterns in the echoes of past decisions yet to ship.
Now, personally, I hope Apple doesn't go entirely back to the old scissor switches. The current butterfly switches do have some good characteristics as well.
The amount of travel was hugely divisive, which is untenable in a product with only one manufacturer, but that is something scissor mechanisms alone should fix. Butterflies were literally like the bottom halves of scissors and now you're getting both halves back.
And the failure rates, regardless of whether you choose to believe they were under-reported to Apple because people simply suffered through them, or that they were exaggerated by the social media rage machine, had become radioactive.
After three generations, membranes, and new materials, there's just nowhere left to go but end-of-line.
But, I really like how flat and stable they make the typing experience. The old scissor switches feel positively loosey-goosey by comparison.
If the new scissor switch design, or the new glass-fiber reinforcements, somehow give us the best of both switch worlds, I'll be super happy.
https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/1146740954080129024
Now, real talk, I had problems with the old scissor keyboards. I'd pop the caps off to clean them when they got goofy, even had to have the whole keyboard and casing replaced once, thanks AppleCare.
And I've been doing pretty much the same with the current MacBook keyboards, popping and cleaning with compressed air, but it doesn't work as well for as many people and they're so much more damn fragile that I can't recommend anyone else even think about doing it, lest your left ordering replacement keys off of Amazon like an animal.
And that's just not a solution for anything approaching normal.
Apple's had bad designs before. The iPhone 4 antenna, infamously, could be killed with a single touch at just the wrong spot, and they even shipped an iPod shuffle that had, I kid you not, no buttons.
But Apple fixed the iPhone 4 antenna in less than a year for the Verizon model and for every carrier in less that 18 months with the iPhone 4s. And they called a mulligan on that iPod shuffle just as fast.
That the butterfly keyboard stayed on the market for this long is atypical, a confluence of bad decisions and bad timing. But, hopefully, it's also exactly the kind of thing Apple's new design org and, yeah, their new operational overlord, Jeff Williams, will catch and correct much, much faster.
I mean, maybe not Steve Jobs "well then why doesn't it do that?!" Throwing things across the room fast. But fast.
At least, as someone who depends on the MacBook Pro day in, day out, that's my beautiful dream. But now I want to hear yours.
