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Comment by lazyier | Hacker News Reader

Apple keyboards are miserable. I don't know why people keep saying that it's so wonderful.

I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.

As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive.

And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.

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Agreed. I can't stand the feel of the MBP (16" 2019) keyboard. For one thing, it's too far to the right. But I also agree with you on the weird flat keys and soft F keys. At least mine has a real esc key. And this is purely habit & preference, but the control/option/command nonsense is infuriating. Everybody else does this the right way, get with the program Apple.

>Apple keyboards are miserable

> I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.

You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.

The keys on the new ones still have pretty short travel though. Much shorter than the pre-butterfly generation, which wasn’t very deep in the first place.

I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.

I hate the butterfly keyboard too, but most importantly the worthless touchbar is gone and the physical escape key is back.

Am I the only one who thinks the touchbar isn't that bad? I have a MBP that has the touchbar and a real escape key. I'm a little sad they ditched the touchbar, I wish they had kept it but put it above the row of function keys. There are some things for which it's handy.

I can't stand the touchbar. Aside from having to look down to know what I'm pressing and Monterey introducing bugs causing it to disappear forcing me to restart my computer, when it does work an entire row of keys shouldn't be able to "go to sleep". My media controls disappearing because I haven't touched my computer in 60 seconds or however long it takes is ridiculous. There's no way to disable it without hacking together a script[1]. It's one of the most frustrating designs of any product I've ever used.

1. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/269174/disable-the...

edit - I just timed the sleep functionality. After 60 seconds it dims, and then 15 seconds later it goes to sleep completely....such a horrible implementation

Having the touchbar and the function keys would have been nice (e.g. if they had kept the function keys half-height, possibly with the exception of the escape and touchid keys).

However since apple decided that only "either" was an option, I'm much happier with having the function keys back.

The new macs are (for me) a return to the pre-2015 era but on steroids. My M1 Macbook Air is a blazing fast dev machine for what I do (dockerized full-stack web dev). I do sympathize with all the mac hate during the dreaded 2016-2020 era. I'm glad I held out and skipped that era entirely.

I had a pre-2015 macbook for a while and I can honestly say that I've never had a worse keyboard. It hurt my fingers and it felt like Apple was trying to destroy my hands. A cheap $10 keyboard felt better.

They fixed the esc key on the 2019 models.

I like the key travel of my (personal) 2015 MBP compared to the 2019 MBP I have for work. I put a keyboard cover on the 2019 and it feels less bad.

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