[atmosx]

I have the exact opposite experience so far. By all means, this is a professional laptop in my opinion.

To expand a bit:

- I love the keyboard, best I've seen on a laptop (I'm a 80+ WPM typist)

- I don't have issues with the touchbar, getting used to quickly manage apps like spotify.

- My default editor is vim and don't have issues with escape

- Trackpad is the best I've seen on a laptop

- The machine is fast

- The screen is amazing

- Battery life is decent

ps. On the other side, I don't have experience working on a high-end XPS/Thinkpad, but the main reason to buy is the OS. 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.

[GordonS]

Interesting. The 2017 Macbook Pro is the first Macbook I've ever had, and I find the keyboard terrible. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but I just struggle to type on it, often finding letters missing from the words I've typed, and the keys never being where my fingers expect them to be. The key travel just feels wrong too.

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!

[microtonal]

It is interesting how polarizing the butterfly mechanism is. I absolutely love it. I can type more accurately and faster on it (they keys feel more stable) and I dread when I have to use an external keyboard with the old scissor switches or a pre-butteryfly MacBook. My colleagues who have a new MacBook Pro also prefer the new keyboard. The only large downside seems to be that it breaks more quickly.

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 ;).

[latch]

This is like saying the Xbox 360 is polarizing. It's not that some people love it and some people hate it. It's that some people get a working one and some people get a broken one.

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

[falcolas]

My experience between a 2015 MBP and a 2017 MBP tells me that the problem is the lack of a tactile difference between keys. Unless I'm focusing really hard, there's very little to tell me without sight where my finger is on a key.

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.

[izacus]

Yeah, I went from 2015 to 2016 MacBook Pro and the keyboard is way way worse. I use several keyboard and this new one is the only one where I regularly make typos (which is very frustrating when typing passwords).

[taneq]

> I find the keyboard terrible.

> I can't put my finger on it exactly

Sounds like that's your problem!

[frabbit]

He was fumbling to find the words.

[jacobolus]

How long have you had it? What’s your typing style?

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.

[GordonS]

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed response!

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.

[jacobolus]

> The Macbook I've only had for 6 months or so, and I only use it once a week or so

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.

[manmal]

How long have you been using it? The keyboard keys getting stuck seems to be a fairly common problem. I think it stems from dirt getting stuck beneath the edges. I had the „k“ key not respond at all for a few days, then I furiously scratched along the edges with a finger nail, and after that it always registered two key strokes (better than none at all). After some weeks, functionality returned to normal.

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.

[deanclatworthy]

I'll add my anecdotal experience to this too. I had to have the whole keyboard replace on mine last week because of a stuck b-key. Fortunately it was still under warranty through work. As of last night some miniscule crumb has got behind the up-arrow key and I have the same problem again.

[manmal]

Yeah.. try cleaning it with a finger nail or piece of sturdy paper. Even though it looks like not doing much, this regularly fixes my problems. Perhaps the crumbs are just pushed inward.

[unwind]

So, uh, you just kkept using the computer even though a common kkey was brokken, for two weekks?!!

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.

[manmal]

You bet I was in rage. I told everyone about it, and ranted on Twitter. I‘m a coder too, you know. But we have no Apple store in Austria, just certified partners, and they all were like „Uhm, we don’t dare try fix this.. we have to send it in. Or do you want a new keyboard? That would be €€€ and you have to leave your machine here with us for a couple days“. Since I have no portable backup machine, I decided to stick it out instead - I thought it might fix itself since it seemed to have to do with dirt beneath the edges. Patient? Yes. Forgiving? Not so much.

[microtonal]

I am so happy that we live a 25 minute drive from an Apple store now. When I lived in the northern Netherlands, there was only an Apple dealer nearby. They were absolutely terrible. I once had a broken 'f' key, the laptop was still under warranty and they were blaming me that I broke the key by removing the key cap (which I didn't). They only repaired the laptop after a lot of arguing.

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).

[manmal]

We will reportedly have an Apple store in Vienna, I‘m looking forward to it :)

[chrisper]

>but the main reason to buy is the OS

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

[CephalopodMD]

nah. I switch between windows, linux, and osx for work and personal use all the time. OSX is just fine. Windows is just fine. Linux is just fine. Everything is at about the same level of ability, the same level of suck, and the same level of "just works." Every modern OS is good looking, occasionally frustrating, and generally effective once you take a few days to figure them out.

[SirZimzim]

I do the same, I have to install a few apps on Mac to help out with window management but otherwise I can't say any OS is a true game changer anymore.

[frabbit]

That's how I feel about it. There is a convergence towards common usability as long as you choose your graphics card carefully for GNU/Linux (no nvidia).

[chipotle_coyote]

I suspect it's the part after this that's more important:

> 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."

[likeclockwork]

> drag and drop feels like a first-class UI metaphor

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?

[jen729w]

God yes. I—personally, just an opinion obviously—detest Windows. I viscerally hate it.

[bjpbakker]

> God yes. I—personally, just an opinion obviously—detest Windows

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

[omnimus]

It is for some. I love linux and want to use it but in printing industry you are done without adobe indesign. There is no good way to run indesign on linux.

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

[macp]

Some Linux distributions are very competitive nowadays, with many desktop environments to choose from.

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

[microtonal]

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.

[frabbit]

I am surprised by your use of a closed-source password manager. I feel much happier using something less susceptible to secret flaws.

[z5qjk]

Oh, that same old argument. No they're not. Absolutely not even close. This is coming from someone who actually uses linux 90% of the time every day. Linux on the desktop is still a huge mess, every desktop environment on linux is a real pain to use, I won't go into details, but those who use linux daily on the desktop cringe reading comments like this, unless using a wm like dwm or i3, but those suck BIG TIME too if you ever have to leave the terminal.

[eloisant]

In general I prefer Linux, but the synergy you get from macOS and the hardware, for energy management in particular, is yet to see on Linux.

[coldtea]

Or you know, to have a UNIX, but also a nice just-works-most-of-the-time desktop UI, device support (for stuff like external audio interfaces, scanners, etc) and access to all kinds of proprietary pro apps, from Above and Microsoft to whatever.

[pentae]

See how much you love that keyboard a year from now once it's built up enough dust under there.

[erebrus]

This is what I find to be the problem. I can get used to typing on it and it's even weird to go back to normal keyboards now. However, keys keep getting stuck due to dust and that is quite unacceptable.

[microtonal]

My wife uses my previous MacBook 12" 2015. It's now over two years old and I used it day in and day out. The keyboard still works fine.

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

[pentae]

Anecdotally my girlfriends 2015 Macbook with 1st gen butterfly switches suffers less of a problem than my MBP with 2nd gen switches

[teilo]

I hate the keyboard (I'm a 110+ WPM typist). I can't feel them as well because there is no sculpting and the key edges are too far from the center of the keys. The keys tend to get stuck and/or don't activate (my Option key requires extra pressure to work). Easily the worst keyboard Apple ever invented.

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.

[rickyc091]

I'll echo these sentiments. I've had the older macs and I love the new butterfly keyboard a lot more. I recall it taking me a week or two to get use to, but I was hitting the same WPM/accuracy right off the bat.

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.

[shyang]

>My default editor is vim and don't have issues with escape

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.

[jen729w]

Or map Esc to `jk`. Gold.

[shyang]

never thought about it! Thanks!

[SauciestGNU]

Just don't forget about it if you're writing something about Dijkstra in vim.

[daveFNbuck]

Or just map caps lock to escape. Then you replace an almost useless home row key with an extremely useful one.

[mogoman]

> if you are using vim, it is more efficient to use ctrl+[ instead of the escape key

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...

[314]

Ctrl-c does the same and it is easier to press.

[shabble]

it's not 100% equivalent, for example C-v (select visual block), I, ..., C-c will cancel the block prepend action, whereas esc or C-[ will execute it.

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.

[SPBS]

I see this caveat all the time, why don't people just rebind C-c to Esc and be done with it

[jvzr]

Anecdotal data for “I love it so far” here, too.

My MBP is a 2016 model, decked-out 13-inch. I can't say I love the Touch Bar but I don't dislike it either. It works fine. I wished the Touch ID sensor was used for more dialogs–some don't use it and I can't understand why. The keyboard is great, love it. The touchpad is awesome, absolutely love it. The screen is amazing. The battery life is OK (I wished it was better but I come from crappy laptops so it is much, much better than what I already know).

[maaaats]

So it's the best trackpad based on sample size of 1, or what?

Lucky you have gotten a keyboard that works. My WPM suffers from having to go back and correct stuff all the time. Of course, now it's almost ingrained that in order to make a space, I have to press the spacebar, and then backspace to remove the extra space.

[jacobolus]

If your laptop is still under warranty and you can wait a few days while they ship it back and forth, Apple will replace the keyboard for you free of charge.

[mthoms]

I had this same keyboard problem and Apple replaced it FYI. You might want to bring it in.