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Comment by jpmoyn | Hacker News Reader

IIRC the keyboard has hardware problems and dead keys are common

This is abslutely crrect.

Sure, that would be shitty. But do we have an authoritative and empirical source indicating a meaningful increase in keyboard hardware problems?

When I search for information about this, I come up with articles like [1]. But none of the data is provided and the analysis isn't exactly...rigorous, to put it charitably.

EDIT: Why in the world has this been downvoted to -3?! This is a reasonable comment to make complete with an example. If you disagree, blindly downvoting isn't informative of anything except that you don't like a comment.

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1. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/30/2016-macbook-pro-...

Google apple keyboard class action lawsuit

The only people that could conclusively provide that information is Apple, and they have no desire to do so. So all we have to go on is anecdata. My personal experiences suggest that the keyboard is problem is widespread, though by no means common.

Uncommon but widespread: Sparse?

The fact that Apple has made a keyboard repair program available indicates just how bad this is directly. We don't have numbers, no, but it's pretty obvious it's not just a small number of users experiencing this given their response.

But do we have an authoritative and empirical source indicating a meaningful increase in keyboard hardware problems?

Apple has that information, and they've decided it's a big enough problem to issue a repair program and adjust the keyboard in the new version:

https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...

So, in answer to your question, yes we do have an authoritative source - Apple.

Okay, that's fair. It looks like it goes beyond the tech reporting bubble then. Thanks for being the only one to provide a cited source in response to my own.

I'll concede that the hardware flaws - independent of personal taste about the touchbar or function keys - is a major problem then.

You can walk into any Best Buy or other non-Apple retail location that sells Apple computers and find at least one machine with keyboard issues. The most common one I've found is a left shift key that doesn't work unless you press it exactly in the center or with excessive force.

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