(If we can get our hands on one, I’ll update this.) As far as we know, Apple’s new warranty replacements are unchanged-if they had improved, you’d think Apple would mention it-but we haven’t analyzed any units that have shipped in the last few weeks. Anyone who has paid Apple to swap out their upper case in the last two years has most likely gotten the newer design. The 2.0 variant seems to handle dust a bit better, but had been on the market for a year before the volume of complaints reached a fever pitch.
They haven’t recovered since.Īpple has shipped two iterations of the butterfly mechanism. The subsequent 2013 update sent the MacBook line into a freefall, earning a mere 1/10-the lowest a notebook had ever earned at that point. We downgraded Apple from a seven-out-of-ten to a two. In our eyes, the new design was a repairability flop. How time-consuming (and therefore expensive) is it to open? Can broken components be replaced individually, or will you have to swap out more expensive larger modules? Our score provides a consumer with an educated guess of repair costs before they buy the product. Unlike the rest of the tech media, we don’t judge products for their release-day usability or aesthetics-we focus on what will happen when the device (inevitably) fails. The new notebook was universally applauded by tech pundits, with one notable exception: my team at iFixit. That radical redesign replaced their rugged, modular workhorse with a slimmed-down frame and first-of-its-kind retina display.
The first-gen butterfly keyboard showed up in 2015, but the real root of the problem dates back to 2012 in the very first Retina MacBook Pro. June 2018: Apple announces keyboard replacement program.Late 2017: Keyboard complaints begin to roll in.The switches have likewise gained some heft.” We note in our teardown, “The keycaps are a little taller at the edges, making keys easier to find with your fingers. October, 2016: Apple introduces butterfly 2.0 in the Late 2016 MacBook Pro.March, 2015: Apple introduces butterfly keys in the 2015 MacBook.As it turns out, the initial run of these keyboards, described by Jony Ive as thin, precise, and “sturdy,” has been magnificently prone to failure. Last week, Apple quietly announced that they were extending the warranty on their flagship laptop’s keyboard to four years. A titan of tech and industrial innovation has been laid low by a mere speck of dust.