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I still don't understand how anyone with hundreds of billions of dollars ships really crappy anything. Like do hundreds of people just pretend that a crappy keyboard isn't garbage or is it so siloed that most people never get an opportunity to register an opinion?

"Hey dev, you don't like that new keyboard pushed by your director/VP? Here's your termination notice!"

"We love our developers and pride ourselves on individual expression and transparent feedback."

-- Corporation 101

This is part of it, but I imagine there was a lot of sunk cost in there as well.

Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory.

Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to indicate that this thing will work in the real world with an acceptable defect rate.

Besides, your management chain loves this thing, because It's Thinner(tm).

And then, you ship it, and discover that this thing breaks way more often in the real world.

But, because Apple, you're a company that never publicly admits to doing anything wrong (because lawsuits), which takes customer feedback with an overly-critical eye (philistines must be using it wrong), and which is more likely to spend it's entire capitalization on cat treats than it is to interrupt an ongoing hardware design cycle.

It's not just management -- it's the company culture.

On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc.

On the other hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being shown horribly, horribly wrong. The snowflake keyboard, the touchbar, the iPhone antenna, etc.

I also suspect this is why Apple's hardware design is just so overall excellent. They identify perfection, and relentlessly pursue it. Sometimes Apple gets it wrong, and it shows, but when they get it right, they get it really right.

>On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc.

When the iPad first came out: "OMG, you can't print! How insane." Probably forgetting other things.

Apple does a ton of things wrong and arguably forces some changes before a lot of the world is ready for them. But they've never prioritized supporting legacy and, in fact, arguably have had a pretty consistent strategy of eliminating legacy at least one or two beats early relative to other companies. Certainly I've found some changes too aggressive. OTOH, there are usually ways to adapt that I've found no more than mildly annoying at first.

> When the iPad first came out: "OMG, you can't print! How insane." Probably forgetting other things.

I very much don't recall anyone complaining about printer support. The primary jab at launch was "it's just a big iPhone". Which was in fact true—it just turned out that "a big iPhone" was pretty damn good, especially when actual iPhones had 3.5" screens.

I'd say most of these sorts of complaints are basically legitimate. When the iPhone came out, it didn't have copy and paste, and that was in fact extremely annoying!

I'm not going to spend the time to look but there were definitely complaints about printing which was still much more of a thing than it is today. (It's still sometimes annoying with both iPad and Chromebook but it's occasional enough that I just mail what I need printed to a computer.)

The thing for me with the original iPad was coming to the realization that it was a (very nice) luxury device that was mostly useful for me (at the time) when traveling. And, when I gave one to my dad, it was a revelation relative to computers that he never could really use.

The keyboard isn't that bad. It had reliability issues which suggest a failure of their stress testing, but it wasn't somehow obviously broken when it shipped

It fails within a few months of usage. Even when replaced twice

And replacing is even more of a problem as it's not simple or cheap. And wasteful.

The 2019 MacBook keyboards are ok. The ones before were worthless. The ones in 2005 had jitter resulting pro keyboards in double key presses rendering them also total garbage.

I am typing on a 2017 MBP keyboard that never broke. While I generally share the criticism it is neither garbage nor worthless. These unnecessary juvenile hyperbolisms are so boring.

The keyboards had a higher fault rate and many other issues and Apple has corrected its mistake, albeit 1-2 years too late from a consumer perspective. That's all there is to the story and the only semi-relevant competition to MBPs was STILL just ThinkPads and XPS, even with the main input device being significantly worse than previous iterations.

I eventually threw away my apple keyboards from 2005 so they are literally garbage.

Regarding the 2017 keyboards, I'm not even talking about the fault rate. They had no escape key and the key travel was too small so it was like typing on a touch screen.

> and the key travel was too small so it was like typing on a touch screen

No, no it's not really.

It's all about preference and tolerance. I bought my Mum an 'old' Apple USB keyboard (i.e. similar to the pre-2017 laptop keys) when her PC's existing KB broke, as I liked mine very much. Being a life-long touch-typer, she just couldn't get on with it, because the travel was too little for her. She's now very happy with a KB with mechanical (Cherry) key switches.

In contrast, I prefer the older Apple KBs, but can get on perfectly well on my 2017 MacBook Pro's KB; and it's not like a touch-screen at all.

>No, no it's not really.

Then maybe I only used broken ones with no perceptible key travel whatsoever.

I wonder, how my use of my 2017 MBP differs from yours - I am constantly burdened with key presses that are registered twice or not at all, keys getting stuck. A bit of dust getting in the switches sometimes renders some keys unmovable - the switch will actuate but there will be almost no perceptible key travel.

I agree that when it does work, there is _some_ feedback from keypresses, but seriously, if they can fake the clickability of the touchpad via haptics, why couldn't they do the same for the keyboard? Out of all devices that I develop on, the macbook is the most frustrating, mostly because of the keyboard.

Hmm, the travel was really something I got used to quickly, although I also prefer more travel. I found the noise and the lack of an escape key much worse and these issues have recently been corrected.

Still, I don't think these issues made the KBs true garbage. Such examples would be nearly any non-MacBook touch pad or often enough display hinges. Far worse than a slightly less convenient keyboard which can always be supplemented with an external bluetooth keyboard as well. Can't really do that with hinges.

> These unnecessary juvenile hyperbolisms are so boring.

If you used the 2016 keyboard, you wont say that.

> The keyboard isn't that bad. It had reliability issues which suggest a failure of their stress testing, but it wasn't somehow obviously broken when it shipped

I had mine replaced twice, but the third revision (which according to Apple is an improved version) has been reliable (except for the key labels wearing off) though I still greatly prefer the 2012 design.

My biggest issue now is the trackpad and its incredibly broken palm rejection that causes the cursor to jump all over the screen. This isn't a settings issue (settings do not help at all) and it was never a problem on older Apple laptops or on the iPad, which has a huge touchscreen with flawless palm rejection. Unfortunately (for me and for Apple), wearing an Apple watch seems to make the broken palm rejection and random cursor jumping even worse.

It’s almost like the amount of money a company has doesn’t correlate with its ability to make a great product :)

I am mostly upset about the low contrast. I hope that gets improved before release.

And sad about the change in sheets and alerts... I’ll probably get over that.

The contrast changes seem varied. For some features they've increased contrast: "windows" are now white with black-ish icons. You can't get a higher contrast ratio. Other features have received the translucency treatment, and seem to have lower contrast.

I'm excited to try it all out, but also unsure how comfortable I'm gonna find it. The large white expanses seem glaringly over-bright to me, at first glance.

The toolbar used to be grey and is now white like the content. And the contrast of text on the translucent items... But overall the style is very consistent.

If it is bright in light mode, it might be nice and dark on dark mode. We’ll find out once people start running the preview

This is a bit off topic but in regards to contrast, I’ve been using Apple’s Music program lately and I absolutely cannot tell the difference between shuffle/repeat on or off. It is the lowest amount of contrast I have ever seen on a toggled button.

I figure it must be something with my machine but haven’t really delved too deeply and couldn’t find much when I looked.

Was hoping for a bit more out of Music. It’s decent, and certainly better than what iTunes had become. But sometimes I’m left wanting.

Although having my Pops be able to share a playlist over iMessage with me was a stellar experience in terms of how seamless it was and having it sync from my phone to my computer.

I don't think it's your machine, although I hadn't tested this until now because I almost never use shuffle. :)

I think the problem is that they're indicating state by toggling between your chosen accent color and black. If your accent color is, say, pink, the difference is pretty obvious, but if your accent color is relatively dark, like blue or purple, it's harder to see. It seems like they could solve this by toggling between the accent color and gray, or "lighting up" a solid roundrect of the accent color around the control when it's on.

That may be a wonderful clue, thank you :-).

Thank you! I just changed my accent colour to green and now it’s easy to tell the difference.

Where do you set accent colour?

It's in the "General" section of the System Preferences

While not an excuse, the design looks like it has much more contrast than 10.10 - 10.15.

I don't see it as a sign of "doom," but rather more regression. It took YEARS for Apple to admit that their keyboards were shit, and they still haven't admitted that the emoji bar on their so-called "pro" computers is an embarrassing and failed gimmick. In fact, they've doubled down on it and now don't offer ANY proper laptop keyboard.

But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some good news for developers. Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support?

Come on.

And still no user-definable color schemes. Windows (and Unix GUIs, for that matter) had them for decades, while Apple forced its late-'80s inverse scheme on every user that whole time. The hard-coded "dark" theme is a half-baked, belated admission that staring into a glaring light bulb with black text on its surface all day may not be the best way to work.

This would also have been a great time to abandon the single menu bar, but nope; that poor decision continues to plague Mac users. Really, this should have been canned in the transition to OS X, but now there's even less of an excuse.

I'm sure there will be some good changes, but from this list I'm not encouraged. Getting rid of the distinction between toolbar and app content... WHY? The "flat UI" experiment was a failure. Let's continue to take tasteful steps back toward GUIs that communicate in universal visual terms whenever possible.

> Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF?

From the Xcode 12 Beta Release Notes:

> Added support for Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) image assets. These preserve their vector representation with deployment targets of macOS 10.15 or later, iOS 13 or later, and iPadOS 13 or later. (18389814)

> Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support?

PDF assets have been supported on all Apple platforms for many years.

The announcements today represent years of work by thousands of engineers and designers. It’s impossible to cover everything in a 2 hour keynote, let alone one geared towards the media/general public. Even the 2 hour “State of the Union” that’s geared towards developers barely scratches the surface, let alone a single webpage.

PDF !!!= SVG

But it is vector.

I know. IMHO, it's nitpicking on a technicality. Use cases are radically different.

@2 @3 allows you to remove detail when needed

> But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some good news for developers. Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support?

Not that I don't think they should support it (they should), but this is almost certainly due to perfectionism and bias, not amateurishness. Apple has an institutional focus on good iconography, and good iconography almost always has different representations for different sizes. The icons scale within a certain size range, then switch to a representation more appropriate for the size. I would be shocked if this is ever completely eliminated from Apple's DNA.

They tried non integer scaling, and it just didn’t work out. You could enable it with some “default write” on 10.4-10.6 IIRC and you could witness the various iterations, but basically the result proved that pragmatically integer scaling gave much more consistent and predictable results.

And yet it works pretty well on Win10, judging by my devices (that have scale settings ranging from 150% to 225%).

> This would also have been a great time to abandon the single menu bar, but nope; that poor decision continues to plague Mac users. Really, this should have been canned in the transition to OS X, but now there's even less of an excuse.

If you are using a precise mouse or trackpad, a menu bar at the top (or edge) of the screen is much easier to than a menu bar anywhere else on the screen, because it has "infinite" extent. This has been known for decades, and is why macOS places the menu bar at the top of the screen and the dock at the bottom or edge.

However, Apple has made remarkable progress rethinking pointer design on the iPad, as seen in this excellent video, "Build for the iPadOS Pointer":

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10640

I still don't have any USB-C devices or wireless headphones. May be in 10 years I'll change my opinion, but as for now, I still think that it was wrong to ditch USB-A and headphone jack.