No, it’s dirt getting under the keyboards. I say this from experience - and because once i started using a “full body” plastic guard across all my Macbook keys, lo and behold, I had no further trouble.
I’m not saying that’s not it, but on a reddit thread (take with grain of salt) that the high likelihood of specific keys failing (e, o, and spacebar) at least on the 2018 Air model, meant some of it was related to heat and materials.
Aside, which cover do you use. I will probably get one for my 2016.
I got one of these
… and to be honest, i prefer just typing with it on, not to mention the protection. It adds just a little bit more definition and key height to make typing feel somewhat more normal on the butterfly keys. It does get a bit less transparent and more opaque over time, but nbd.
I don’t know about the Air… maybe the heat is somehow affecting the film they put over the keys? But if heat is causing a problem - which it might be, dunno - that would indicate an another entire class of failure.
Everyone keeps crossing their fingers for ARM but imo there’s little chance Apple does frankly anything different on the hardware side for years without a significant change in management or a significant decline in share price. Current Apple is all about supply chain optimization, and the current company culture for whatever behind the scenes reasons has decided any changes are either too risky, not profitable, or not particularly desirable.
There isn’t going to be a crossover iOS, there isn’t going to be an ARM MacOS, there isn’t going to consolidation between product categories, they aren’t going to make significant - if any - changes to existing product categories. For whatever reason maximizing the supply chain for the external stuff (laptop body style and shape, iPad style and shape, ect) overrides all other considerations.
This is the Reddit thread I was referring to. I haven’t re-read it to check my memory, but I recall that the plastic thing helped.
I do think we will see ARM on Mac OS. Apple was very clear in throwing Intel under the bus on their last earnings call, and I think the Marzipan stuff is a step in that direction. That said, I do think the earliest we see Arm announced is WWDC 2020.
That is already happening with Marzipan. Sounds like a good potion of the next round of Mac apps are going to be Marzipan based and developers are already playing with the tools for converting their apps.
Also, Tim Cook said last earnings call that Intel is what is holding back Macs. No way ARM Macs aren’t coming soon, they have already started laying the ground work. Not sure if it’s in the next year, but certainly in the next couple.
Nah, worse comes to worse they switch to AMD for their chips - they don’t want to though because AMD chips are far less efficient for laptops. I think calling out Intel was basically them publicly saying to Intel not to rock the boat and so fix their S@#$. Apple would love not to rock the boat today and will only do so if they have no other choice. If Intel forces them to switch, well fine then, but it won’t be their first choice.
Going all-ARM would be like going back to Power-PC days. And those weren’t exactly the high water mark for Apple. Don’t get me wrong i would love to see ARM Macs but the fear of cannibalizing iPad / Mac sales would be strong enough that they’re very very heavily disincentivized to do so.
Marzipan is their attempt to rescue the moribund Mac App Store with iOS success stories, not make a bridgehead from which ARM moves to the desktop. IMO of course!
Or it’s a way for developers to easily convert their apps to run on both. Sort of like an OS crossover or something. The developer crowd have been impressed so far.
Aside: I love these kinds of discussions.
I think we are close to where Apple was with the PowerPC transition. Apple’s SoCs for iPads are amazing, and that is where they are constrained by little things like cooling. The USB-C iPads have single-core benchmarks that rival or exceed MacBook Pros. I think Apple wants to control the entire stack and let their SoC folks loose and create some laptops with great power and battery life. AMD and Intel aren’t going to give it to them.
There are a couple of routes Apple can take. They can create the iOS Laptop some people want. A MacBook One form factor with a touchscreen and is a convertible device like Lenovo’s. IOS 13 will start to give is some idea on this. If iOS supports external monitors, input devices, external storage, and the like I think we may see something like this. This would be the safe way of saying, “oh, it’s an iOS device that acts like a true laptop replacement. Have fun.”
Or, Apple can go fuck Intel and start to transition the entire line of Mac to ARM. Steve Jobs’ Apple would do this. Tim Cook’s, not sure about. He tends to like to keep old SKUs around. That ARM transition would fuck over a lot of people who use x86 code bits or use wrappers like Wine to get games to work. I don’t think Apple cares too much about fucking those people over. The days of Apple being glad people can run Windows on Macs to help drive up hardware sales are over. That is pre-iPhone Apple.
Apple desperately wants to control its own destiny and margins by making the entire stack in every business they compete in. I agree that the only questions about MacOS on A-series chips are when it happens and how immediate the change is across the board.
I don’t think Apple desperately wants to control its own destiny - they would have ditched Intel three years ago if that were true. I think Apple wants to minimize risks, and ditching Intel is a big risk. I do agree Steve Jobs would leap at the chance to f@#$ over a heretofore reliable supplier because Steve Jobs.
There’s all sorts of amazing “what if” products they could make if they were able to integrate iOS and a desktop OS - imagine all sorts of of “MacDock” laptops or “MacDesk” iMacs - computers that you just plug your phone into as the brains and primary storage and then use as a regular desktop or laptop. Their phone SOCs are easily fast enough now. But all that is a big risk and a big investment, and not only that but would probably cannibalize sales.
And that’s the problem with Apple today - they have stagnant or declining phone volumes worldwide, which they have tried to (somehow) get investors to forget by refusing to breakdown the phone category in their reports like they once did (which, tbh, is kind of nuts for a company of this market cap, though i’m sure some people will try to rationalize it away if asked). They really kind of need you to by an MacBook AND an iPhone AND an iPad AND an iWatch AND some branded accessories AND ect…
All the modern Apple today (IMO!) wants is to find another AND category to get you to buy, not consolidate categories. The iPhone / iPad / smaller MacBook all overlap useage patterns to some extent today - and Tim Cook wants to push those usage patterns further apart to keep you buying all three, not bring them together.
That’s not what they want though (they would love that of course), they seem to be going all in services. Music, news, storage space, and TV. Their March event made that abundantly clear.
They’re going all in on services not because they want to but because they have to, because hardware sales are flattening out. IOW you’re seeing the result and are mistaking it for the cause. They in no way want to reduce product categories - if anything the release of several “old is new again” product lines like MacBook Air, iPad Air and iPad Mini is exactly the kind of differentiation you’d see when they’re trying to prop up hardware sales by making more diverse categories and try to catch the marginal categories in the cracks.
Services are their way of getting more blood from the stone - and then people are telling them they want to consolidate 3 Apple devices into 1 because that would be cool! And then they’d post record yearly sales declines.
This is the catch 22 of ARM desktop - essentially they’d only release laptop\desktop ARM that was functionally identical to current hardware (ie not overlapping iPad use cases and functionality) and so have to make the pitch to consumers that they’re gaining nothing and losing functionality over X % of their workflow.
This is an interesting time to analyze Apple. The old playbook is gone. Apple in the past didn’t care too much about cannibalizing. It is hard to see where they stand on that now. Part of me feels Apple still doesn’t care bout it too much. They would rather take 1k+ of your money than none of it.
Of course, old Apple used to just have a “good, better, best” model for products and now it us just “here is what another $100 gets you.”
Apple does have a renewed focus on the Mac, which makes armchair theorizing about ARM fun.
Well yeah. They want to go where the money is. It seems like you really want to push the narrative that Apple is dead in the water and unwilling to change while ignoring what they are doing. Sure they would love to just keep selling more and more of their old products, but that just doesn’t work for any company. The wearables and services departments have been their biggest improving markets so they are concentrating on them. They could certainly do better in the Mac department, but PCs just aren’t a huge market anymore. Even if they got their crap together on their laptops, it won’t affect their bottom line much.
Controlling their own destiny and margins, and they have demonstrated both quite thoroughly over the years. CPU, GPU, SSD controllers, security chips — that list continues to grow.
3 years ago, A-series wasn’t as competitive with x86 as it is now. 3 years ago, most people didn’t expect Intel would still be stuck on 14nm in 2019. But here we are.
Switching architectures is not a bridge too far for Apple. You may not be, but I guarantee that Intel is taking that possibility seriously.