The end of the butterfly keyboard on MacBooks is here

Keyboard

It was him month of April 2015 and Apple released the butterfly mechanism on the keyboards of its brand-new 12-inch MacBook. At that time everything seemed really spectacular and clear, with so much technology together the specialized media we could not cope: "A stepped battery", "a much flatter keyboard with a butterfly mechanism", a "USB type C port" ... This type of keyboards with the same mechanism it would come months later to all MacBook Pro.

Apple was squeezing to bring news on its MacBooks and it succeeded. The problem came shortly after, and is that the first teams of Apple had a serious problem with their new keyboard design. Yes. This important part of the equipment was a failure that many of us believed that Apple would solve with a new and improved version.

It's official! This is the new 16-inch MacBook Pro

Early adopters affected by butterfly keyboards

These users were brave when buying a computer that presented different novelties with respect to the rest of Apple models. It was actually thinner and lighter than a MacBook Air but Apple still kept the MacBook Air (which in the end was the team that stayed in its catalog) with the old keyboard and hardly any changes to it. In any case, those affected by the failures of the keyboard with a butterfly mechanism were few, but others and others and others appeared ...

Turns out the main problem with these keyboards was its short haul. The keys were bigger and really simple to use once you got used to it, the sound of the keys was different, but their main «handicap» was undoubtedly the little travel of these keys, which caused any type of dirt that entered the keyboard. keyboard literally nailed the key and it stopped working.

It's official! This is the new 16-inch MacBook Pro

Compressed air, cleaning and other tricks

Apple advised to be careful with the keyboard and use compressed air for cleaning, something that many users saw as a botch and it really was. In any case, the company did not take long to launch a revision of the keyboard in the next generation.

Yes, a new keyboard arrived with some changes but they were not enough to solve the problem and the keyboards still left some keys stuck with no option to use. A next generation and even another received small changes in the design (including a kind of plastic inside) to solve the problem but this ultimately did not solve the problem. Today users continue to appear with the failure and logically Apple opened a replacement program for users affected with the problem.

This program is still active today while we are writing the article, so if you have this bug go to the nearest Apple store or ask for an appointment so that they review it since it can be at cost 0. In any case the keyboard was doomed from the first months.

It's official! This is the new 16-inch MacBook Pro

No, not all butterfly keyboards fail

And I say this from my own experience and that is that right now I am writing to you from one of these keyboards and I really do not have any key problems with it. Logically I take care of it a little more than the rest of the keyboards and that the rest of computers that I have had previously and is that I know the problem so I do not want it to happen to me. I don't eat while working, I don't leave it open in places where there is a lot of dust and I try to clean the keyboard every so often with a simple synthetic chamois so that dirt doesn't get between the keys.

I know closely a couple of cases where the keys on their MacBook Pros (specifically two 13-inch ones) failed the keyboard and they went through the Apple Store to hold on to the replacement program Hopefully Apple will keep it open for many years to come. In both cases it was solved free of charge and to this day they continue to enjoy the butterfly mechanism keyboards on their computers just like I did on my 12-inch MacBook from 2017.

MacBook Pro

The 16-inch MacBook Pro definitely changes the keyboard

We can say that after all these years and with the same 12-inch MacBook out of the market in favor of the MacBook Air, Apple reconsiders and realizes that keyboards with this butterfly mechanism must disappear. Now and surely in the next generations of Apple MacBooks these keyboards will all be like those of the newly released 16-inch MacBook Pro. These have the Magic Keyboard inserted inside, with keys with more travel but reliable since they are the ones that have been used in iMac keyboards for a long time.

If you plan to buy a MacBook now, keep in mind that the only one that has this new keyboard is the 16-inch one, that not all users are having problems with keyboards with a butterfly mechanism but that possibly (almost certainly) the next generations abandon this troublesome keyboard how many headaches it will have given Apple engineers.


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