By comparison, I also have a very cheap Asus netbook (13", I think) - it was about £100 compared to about £3000 for the MBP, and it actually has a better keyboard!

Of course, in the end it is a matter of taste. It would be nice if Apple could find some compromise between the new and the old design. But Apple being Apple, they will stick to it ;).

There's enough complaints about broken butterfly keyboards to conclude that the failure rate is significantly higher (across both the first and second generation).

This results in hitting 1 instead of ~, losing my place on the keyboard on a regular basis, and being completely unable to find the arrow keys by touch. Perhaps my typing is a bit sloppy, but it works just fine on the 2015 MBP, with a tiny fraction of the errors I encounter on the 2017 MBP.

> I can't put my finger on it exactly

Sounds like that's your problem!

Finding where the key tops are is largely down to familiarity/practice, and it’s possible your netbook had smaller-than-standard key spacing, which then might take some time to readjust to the standard key spacing.

I’m sorry Apple made the key tops bigger and the gaps between keys smaller on this version though, as smaller key tops with wider spaces between tend to help train your fingers to find the right keys and reduce errors from accidentally hitting a corner or edge of the neighboring key. The change to the arrow key layout is IMO a serious regression.

I also think the key travel is a bit too shallow, but after a while most people can sort of get used to it. The new snappier tactile feedback is pretty nice. I wish they could figure out a way to make a keyboard with the old amount of key travel (or even slightly more), very reliable, but with the new tactile feedback which hearkens back to full-travel clicky switches of the 70s and 80s.

Many people used to rubber domes and cheap laptop keyboards end up with a typing style where they really mash the keys down hard into the bottom of the stroke. This especially comes about when people use the cheapest type of rubber dome boards (e.g. the ones that came with most PC desktop computers in the 2000s, including Macs) which need to be pressed all the way down to actuate, and sometimes actuate unreliably unless the key is pressed very firmly; using such a keyboard for any extended time ingrains incredibly damaging habits.

If you try to do a hard mashing style of keypress on a key with extremely shallow travel and not much cushion at the bottom, you’ll put a sharp impact on your fingers with every keystroke, and cause quite a bit of strain. It’s kind of like what happens if someone habitually runs wearing shoes with thick padded heels, landing on his/her heels with every step, and then switches overnight to running barefoot on concrete, without changing running form. Ouch!

If this describes your typing style, try to figure out a way to type with a lighter springier kind of stroke, ideally with your forearms and palms floating in the air above the keyboard instead of resting on any surface. Try to type with just enough force to reliably actuate the key, but not much more. (Irrespective of which type of keyboard you are using.)

Edit: in response to otempomores’s dead comment: this is not intended as an apologia (maybe try reading more carefully?). As a long-time keyboard nerd, I’m just sharing some of my impressions of the changes (positive and negative), and providing some hopefully helpful additional feedback/advice, most of which should be broadly applicable beyond this particular keyboard.

I've had the netbook for 1-2 years, but I only use it one every few months or so. Still, it's a joy to type on for such a small device.

The Macbook I've only had for 6 months or so, and I only use it once a week or so (I work mostly on Windows, but need to build iOS apps). I should also have said it's the 13" version.

TBH, I don't really want to try change my typing style to suit the MBP; that kind of reminds me of Apple's infamous "your're holding it wrong" response to users complaining of aerial issues with one of the iPhones from years back :)

I regularly work on quite a few different keyboards (6, I think!) and indeed have worked on several over the years, but this is the only one I've ever had any real issue with.

The once a week part might make it extra difficult to adjust. I’ve seen reports from several people who found the new Apple keyboard uncomfortable/weird for the first few weeks of full time use, but then got used to it well enough.

Switching between a full-travel desktop keyboard (of whatever type) and a very low-travel keyboard could be a pretty jarring transition.

Personally I prefer a keyboard with longer travel distance, and generally despise all laptop keyboards. The new Apple laptop keyboard is for me not really significantly better or worse than previous Apple laptop keyboards or than the better PC laptop keyboards. It’s a bit different – a nicer tactile response, but less travel distance – but for me those are roughly a wash.

Have you considered using an external keyboard with the laptop? I generally prefer to use an external keyboard if I have any significant amount of typing to do.

As for “holding it wrong” – many if not most people I have watched type have quite terrible posture and typing style, which is why so many end up developing repetitive strain injuries. 40 years ago, typists were likely to go through serious typing training at a secretarial school, and learn ways of sitting and typing which tried to accommodate human practice to the shape of the typewriter so that it was possible to be efficient while not injuring themselves. Nowadays people tend to learn in an ad-hoc way by just picking up the device and figuring it out for themselves. I constantly see people sitting slouched, their arms reached way out in front of their bodies and palms or forearms resting on the table, with wrists flexed uncomfortably upward, etc.

Most of our furniture (and definitely our computer keyboards!) are not very well designed for human anatomy. Ideally keyboards would be split into two pieces, tented upward at the middle, and detached from a display so that the keyboard part could be kept close to the torso. Each half of the keyboard would be better designed to put as many buttons as possible within very easy reach, and aligned with the fingers instead of an arbitrary staggered grid dictated by the implementation details of 19th century typewriters. The screen could be placed slightly below eye level, tilted slightly upward, and at least 2.5 or 3 feet away from the face. Logical keyboard layouts would be fixed to be more efficient and convenient. Etc.

The escape key has a steep learning curve, but after a few weeks you learn to always hit it. I don’t like the lack of physicality though.

Touchbar controls sometimes get stuck in a State (Eg after sliding volume up or down), so I had some instances of suddenly playing very loud music when I really couldn’t use it.

Battery life is 2h for me, with XCode, Simulators, Safari and Slack open. My previous MBPro (first with Retina display) did 3h in this scenario although its components were older and needed more power. Maybe High Sierra is to blame though.

I would have loved an iteration on the previous design - change 2 USB-A ports for USB-C, maybe the new keyboard and only slightly bigger touchpad, and I personally don’t care about the lit Apple logo. It‘s not nostalgia, but pure practicality. My coworkers were always a bit envious of my MBPro, but now they hear me swearing a lot about this and that.

And then it healed itself so that's no biggie?

Makes me wonder about your workflow. I write code and would have been in a (silent, I'm from Sweden) rage in a day or less.

Holding out for so long with a major fault seems very forgiving.

I had to use my warranty twice at an Apple Store and the experience was stellar. One time they repaired my phone within two hours. With a broken MacBook Pro, they just replaced it. No questions asked. I know that some people have bad experiences, but for me their support has been a lot better than that of Apple dealers and other vendors (looking at you Motorola/Lenovo).

Is that still true? I feel like that argument is vanishing more and more these days.

> My workflow and tools are tailored around the mac. It's not that I can't find my way through Linux or even a BSD Laptop running i3. It's that I don't want to.

I've been mostly full-time on the Mac since...2003, I think? I would be fine with Linux or FreeBSD, and I could live with Windows, but I'd just prefer not to. For me, macOS captures nearly everything that I loved about old-school Macs and everything that I love about Unix. There's a lot of little touches that make macOS just "feel better" to me, although I've found in practice those get to be really hard to explain in ways that don't make me sound slightly insane. For instance, drag and drop feels like a first-class UI metaphor on macOS in ways that it never did to me on Windows or any Linux desktop environment; I'm dragging and dropping all the time on the Mac in ways that I didn't--or in more than a few cases, simply couldn't--elsewhere. And when people rail against how difficult macOS is to customize and bend to their will, it's clear they're using very different metrics than I am.

I think other GUIs have certainly narrowed the gap over the years, and not everyone agrees with Apple's design decisions. (Including me, although most of the ones that drive me nuts are hardware decisions, and a continued obstinance in opening iOS up enough to let it become the general-purpose computing platform they seem to be positioning it as.) But as long as macOS keeps doing what I want and Apple doesn't screw the pooch hardware-wise, then I'm in the camp of "yes, I will buy Apple products to keep running macOS."

This is definitely a taste thing. Personally I hate drag and drop, everytime I'm forced to do it I wonder why the developers are making me perform virtual manual labor. Why am I applying constant pressure to carry things from one side of the screen to the other?

There's a lot more choice than just macOS and Windows.. :)

I am hoping for kvm/virtulasition with gpu passthrough will soon be good enough solution.

A key reason to own a Mac would be to build iOS apps and MacOS software.

For me, the reason to own a Mac (besides hardware support and generally liking macOS) is the amount and quality of third-party software. There is a lot of software that I either need or want, and there are no good-enough competitors on Linux, e.g.: Microsoft Office (for work), 1Password, Affinity Designer, Pixelmator, Acorn, LaunchBar, Little Snitch, Tweetbot, Mic Snitch, DeckSet, Paprika (for recipes), Things, PDF Expert, Arq, Dash, Sonos, etc. In addition, a lot of these tools and macOS are very well integrated, e.g. I can directly search Dash or 1Password from Launchbar. I can make a phone call to a person directly from Launchbar, etc.

For some work there are better open source tools, e.g. Emacs as an editor, org-mode for notes/outlining, LaTeX for typesetting, Handbrake for video transcoding. But they all work fine on macOS.

(The MacBook 12" also uses the butterfly mechanism, though the 2015 version uses the first iteration.)

The touchbar is useless. The only things I ever use on it are the brightness and volume controls - which worked just fine with the function keys they removed. Actually, they worked better, because I didn't have to look at the keyboard to use them.

The trackpad is ridiculously large, which makes it awkward. Palm detection is poor because my palm hovers just above the trackpad when I am typing, and the slightest brush (as I'm typing) moves the pointer. This would not be a problem with a trackpad of reasonable size.

I agree with the rest. Even on my external keyboards, I have caps-lock mapped to Ctrl and Esc via a Karabiner-Elements script.

As for Windows, I think they have some great hardware out there. I really enjoyed the Surface, but the OS was terrible. What I realized was that software developers didn't take the time to really focus on the UI and polish the apps. Even apps like 1password had horrendous experience. I hacked it into a hackintosh, but it was a pain to keep it updated and some features were missing from a real Mac. At the end of the day, a Mac still wins over for me.

Edit >>

Wanted to add, the one thing that annoys me about the touchbar is that I accidentally hit the top right keys when I hit backspace. Aside from that, I'm fine with it on vim. Escape isn't an issue.

if you are using vim, it is more efficient to use ctrl+[ instead of the escape key. This way your hands are staying where they mostly are.

I'm always amazed by how, after using vi(m) for so many years one can always learn something new. I opened a session and tried it out and then found my hand moving to the escape key automatically...

Took me a while to realise that when messing around with visual/block.

I still mostly use C-c from muscle memory though, but do occasionally swear at it.