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The Butterfly effect, its back! New 13" MBP 2018 has keyboard issues

And it wasn’t dust or sand as the silicon garters would have stopped that! Something deeper if happening!

A 13″ MacBook Pro 2018 Develops Faulty Keyboard; Apple Orders Replacement From China

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It’s about time Apple takes the new keyboard out back and shoots it. It’s beyond help and needs to be retired… permanently. This design can’t be saved.

It HAS to be a fault with the butterfly hinge mechanism. I’m putting my bet down now that it’s a butterfly mechanism fault that can only be fixed by putting a working keyboard that’s proven in the systems. Up next is to wait for the denial (despite KNOWING it’s a problem), the lawsuit and bullshit repair program to get rid of the lawyers (while denying the design flaw everyone knows exists).

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I've managed to get someones ear at Apple (Executive Relations) on their failure to meet the professional laptop needs. And one of the bones is the bad keyboard.

While they won't offer any info on their future direction, I did get the feeling they are listening to more than me echoing the same message.

The problem they face is the voices are so deafening and some of it is noise for the sake of noise. So hearing a clear concise message is hard for them to know if it holds water.

There's also the issue of saving face! No one likes being told they did it wrong. Sometimes doing at it from the side is a better way. In my travels in Japan & Korea I had to learn that lesson the hard way.

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I do believe the butterfly as designed is a failure. The failure is mostly in the material choices and how the keycap is fastened. The improvements Apple did with the silicon cover I think is a good solution to prevent material from getting under the hinge with the current design.

I also think there is something deeper going on here because there is just not enough breathing room for the system as a whole so the keyboard from below is overheating.

I personally don't like it as its noisy and the low travel.

I do think there is a way to design a thin keyboard but it won't be mechanical! Forget blister switches too!

The correct way is using a set of lasers which make your X (6) & Y (12) matrix across the back side of the keys. The keys are mounted in spring loaded pistons. The piston deflects the beam when the key is pressed. As there are two beams X & Y the given key is identified.

There are a few different ways that one could do this. Thats were it could get interesting! I think I could even do this with just two lasers! And even bring the detecter count down to six!

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It's always been a problem with Macs since they've historically preferred to throttle the CPU OR heat the laptop up more for a few mm of thickness removed but we've never seen keyboard issues before; they were always thick enough to take it. It doesn't surprise me, but the levels they're taking it to nowadays are unacceptable. It was fine in the C2D days since the Peryn chips were cool running, but many of these Core i series HQ series chips run hotter then the C2D ever did. Apple should use the space gained by removing the optical drive to improve the thermal situation. Apple lost their direction when Jobs died.

HP removed optical drives from the ZBook lineup over time but they use it to put large batteries in and improve overall cooling. Between Apple's shenanigans with the soldered RAM and SSD, poor cooling and bullshit repair programs I've liked them less and less these days. The ZBook lineup looks like a real competitor to the MBP (and a good one!). THIS IS COMING FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS AVOIDED HP FOR 10 YEARS DUE TO BAD EXPERIENCES.

The problem is worse on the newer chips since Apple is putting a Core i9 in a chassis that barely handles an i7 without baking it to death. Yikes!

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Apple is not the only one facing the rathe of the i9 in a thin frame. So you can't pin that on Apple alone.

But! Apple is the one that started the 'Thin Is In' movement and it looks like they've hit the wall! As the newer Intel CPU's are just too hot for the thinner frame. If Intel had managed to get the next node up and running then this chip would have been 20% cooler at base clock.

But, the issue of the older systems is a bit more complicated! If you put your self back to 2009 when the Unibody MacBook Pro was introduced Apple was able to run their systems without overheating with the Apps at the time.

It didn't take long for the apps to ramp up needing more RAM and CPU power, let alone GPU performance. Each generation after was facing the same basic issue as Apple ramped up the performance the apps kept getting heavier in CPU & graphics load! 2010 was the point where Apple couldn't keep up! This was also true for Windows systems too. As Apple apps were a bit more graphical they tended to overheat more which throttled the CPU. Even still the throttling didn't drop the CPU below the base clock.

I'm not saying Apple was blameless here! It's just they didn't read the market and clearly both Intel and the GPU suppliers weren't helping things! 2013 retina models where the start of Apple building systems which didn't throttle as badly.

Yes, Apple should have built better cooling into their systems. But the bigger question is what was people expecting in performance? Before my bigger customer migrated to HP systems, we had mostly 15" 2012 Unibodies in the field. We did not have a rash of overheating issues as we didn't run apps that pushed the system as hard as others had. We where mostly using CAD & line drawing apps, besides the typical MS Word & Outlook.

So we have an amalgam of interactions. And that doesn't include keeping the system clean of dust and applying a fresh coat of thermal paste every three or so years.

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The i9 should only be used in full fat workstations. I 100% agree with you on that one... That one is on Intel. It reminds me of the 2007 nVidia fiasco where nVidia underrated the chips and everyone who used them was affected; to be fair that was also because of bad fab manufacturing but those things were never designed to be in the laptops they were put in. Apple is handling it worse then the others, so I do blame them for badly handling it.

I mostly blame Apple because their machines do it the worst. If I found a PC that used the Apple method of throttling>thickness, I'd have as much of an issue as I have towards Apple doing it. The thing is most PC's are legitimately designed to take it and Apple is always the one who designs for throttling to gain a few mm removed from the chassis.

I had the 4GB in my 2009 17" for it's entire life because I never got around to the upgrade. By the time I installed 10.9 it became clear I hit the end of the road with 4GB and I'd need a RAM upgrade if I didn't just go for an entire system like I chose to, seeing as I had it for ~7 years.

Part 2 because I had to use the character limit "feature" to expand on this:

My 2009 was probably designed to throttle, but I never noticed. But that's also because the Peryn C2D was such a cool running chip it wasn't noticeable when it happened. Come around to Arrandale and you started to run into problems. The days of designing for tolerable throttle were over because those chips ran so hot; it was practically a daja-vu back to the P4M laptops which ran hotter then the sun. It probably would have been fine with better cooling, but Apple didn't do it; they bet on the throttling being hard to notice. As a result of that, the throttling effect was worse then it ever was on the Peryn Unibody.

The only reason the throttling problem came down to a better level is because Haswell, Broadwell and Skylane are designed more for power reduction then performance gains. Intel hit a brick wall with performance gains, so they were smart about it and focused on TDP reduction.

I did clean my machine but I never replaced the thermal paste. That's mainly because when I had it I was too afraid to remove the board to do it. I'm not afraid to do it anymore so I did the paste in my Dell to get a little more life out of it before the Zen2 ZBook 15 comes out and the temps are manageable because the OEM Dell paste is shot after 3 years. I also push my machines fairly hard (mainly because of photography and video editing) so I probably deal with a degree of throttling on many laptops others don't deal with. That's why I don't use laptops like the ones many here use; I legitimately can't use them because they generally don't have a dGPU and in a lot of cases, the performance by the IGP is insufficient if you're pushing it.

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Dan will be eternally grateful.