Apple’s latest MacBook Pro machines - announced on Friday - come with Cupertino's third-generation butterfly keyboard. Underneath the keycaps is a design change that is sure to spark a lot of discussions.
Apple notes that the new butterfly keyboard on the ‘mid-2018 MacBook Pro machines’ retains the same amount of vertical travel’ while providing a quieter typing experience. That makes for great copy and of course, continues to advance the point of Apple’s continual improvements, but there may be a very useful side-effect to the tweak to the keyboard design.
The silicone cover over each butterfly switch reduces the chance of any dust getting trapped in the mechanism. Given the issues that Apple has faced over the faulty keyboards - with long-term Apple watcher Jon Gruber calling the butterfly keyboard ‘Apple’s biggest screw-up’ - action to change the construction was to be expected.
In fact, the silicone cover technique on show was something I highlighted as an option in March, when the USPTO published an Apple patent for ‘Ingress Prevention For Keyboards’. The patent talks about...
Keyboards include mechanisms that prevent and/or alleviate contaminant ingress… In other embodiments, a keyboard includes a base; a web that defines apertures; keys moveably coupled to the base within the apertures; and a gasket coupled to the keys, the gasket fixed between the web and the base, operable to block passage of contaminants into the apertures.
I can’t see anything about reducing noise levels in this patent, and it looks remarkably close to what the teardown team at iFixit has discovered about the changes:
Here’s the really good part: I can tell you it’s there, but I can’t definitively prove it’s a reliability fix. After all, Apple told The Verge that “this new third-generation keyboard wasn’t designed to solve those [dust] issues.”
Apple is in the middle of several class-action lawsuits for the failure of their keyboards, so of course they can’t just come out and say, “Hey, we fixed it!” That says there was a problem to begin with. But you’ve heard that clever analysis from John Gruber already. I’m just here to posit: the advertised boost in quietude is a side-effect of this rubbery membrane. The quiet angle is, quite literally, a cover up.
The question now is if this will reduce the number of damaged keyboards in the new machines. And I wonder if any repairs to older MacBook Pro keyboards will incorporate this new technology?
Now read more about Apple’s strategy of not promoting the new MacBook Pro laptops…
