[cseelus]

That would be Dan Riccio, wouldn‘t it? He is senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, directly answering to Tim Cook and leading the Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod engineering teams.

Some of the current/recent failures that come to mind:

- The MacBook keyboard issues discussed here

- The MacPro disaster (thermal design issues -> no real update since almost six years)

- The The MBP 2018 thermal design issues

- The MBP „Flexgate“ (display connector design flaw)

- The AirPower debacle

- The iPad Pro 3rd gen. „Bendgate“

[chipotle_coyote]

Dan might be the guy who falls on his sword if anyone does, but I suspect that he is struggling with design constraints imposed from someone higher up. Someone obsessed with making everything as thin as possible -- which is arguably the root of many of Apple's hardware woes, large and small. Someone with a British accent who is fond of white rooms.

(Having said that, I think some of those issues are somewhat overstated. The keyboard is a real issue; the Mac Pro's thermal corner is a real issue, but it's one we have solid evidence is being addressed by both the forthcoming Mac Pro and the already-existing iMac Pro; AirPower is a debacle, but I don't know if that's really his purview; the rest...eh. I'm not saying they're not real, but I don't know how widespread they are as real issues. But with the exception of AirPower and the Mac Pro, all the issues you listed would probably have literally been solved by making everything 1mm thicker.)

[atomical]

I think Ive is preparing us for laptops without keyboards. Two screens, one that you type on. It's a dumb idea but I think they will go through with it.

[chipotle_coyote]

It's quite possible that's what Ive personally would be happy with, but I don't think Apple's going to do that any time soon. As "courageous" as they like to be with jettisoning old technology, they're aware of what a PR fiasco their current generation of laptops has become. If anything, swapping back to low-profile scissor switches and quietly jettisoning the Touch Bar is the most likely next-gen MBP shift.

[TMWNN]

If Touch Bar were in addition to the function keys + Escape key, everyone would praise it as yet another brilliant Apple innovation, and rivals would be copying it the way every notebook nowadays looks like the late-2008 unibody Macbook Pro (and really, all the way back to the 2001 titanium PowerBook). But it's not, so they don't and they aren't.

[chipotle_coyote]

It's possible. It's not impossible that if they'd just kept the hardware escape key and replaced the function keys with the Touch Bar it would have gotten a warmer reception; I think Apple really underestimated (a) how much of the MBP's loudest and most influential audience is comprised of developers or developer-adjacent techies, and (b) how many of those folks are really attached to their escape key. Personally I would be a lot happier with that -- in practice, I don't really miss the function keys and media keys, and I've actually used some of the Touch Bar functionality once in a while, but not having the escape key makes me angry and I'm not even a dedicated Vim user.

[scarface74]

I think techies overestimate their influence. The Mac’s revenue was the highest it’s ever been last quarter. The lack of an escape key didn’t hurt sells.

[asdff]

At that point I'd duct tape a magic keyboard on the laptop and watch the Ive fanboys rage.

[mcphage]

> The AirPower debacle

I'm not sure "debacle" is the right word for a product they announced, and then later decided they couldn't make, and so cancelled. There were no physical copies out there, no consumers wasted money on it, it was just... a cancelled product.

[pier25]

Do you think the engineering team decides the thickness of laptops or the design team (Ive) impose specs onto the engineers?

[kevin_b_er]

Apple operates on Form Over Function and has for years. The engineering team is subservient to the design team. You are seeing the consequences of it live. The engineering team knows the butterfly keyboard design is fundamentally flawed, but the design team has priority. There's only so much the engineers can do to make it Function while being constrained by Form.

This is the same type of corporate structural flaw as Boeing has, just without the loss of life for Apple. They needed to sell the plane without re-certifying, so the management demands some poor engineers work around it while having their hands tied behind their back.

[snowwrestler]

Without constraints and product goals, engineering is just wanking around with math. Every great product you've ever used started with a vision and then engineering was brought to bear to make the vision a reality.

There is a role for engineering to adjust the vision when necessary to comport with reality. It's not clear that was an issue with these keyboards as it's not clear that anyone knew up front that the butterfly mechanism would have these problems.

It's worth remembering that when Apple launched this keyboard, they didn't just say it's thin, they touted the engineering that went into it. I really, really doubt that this was a situation where the engineering team was banging the problem gong and was overruled. I know that's a popular way of thinking here on HN but I need at least some evidence to believe it.

This looks more like well-intentioned innovation that has just not worked out as well as they hoped, which happens sometimes, even with competent engineers. It's why Apple keeps such cash reserves on hand, so they can try new things and survive the ones that don't work out. Thankfully in this case, laptop keyboards are not life and death products.

[scarface74]

You have no proof of that. They are both VPs. Once you have a certain level of authority, you don’t get to shift the blame.

[atomical]

I'm curious why Apple engineering employees don't post here. It would be a great time for that.

[ummonk]

Apple is notoriously secretive, and has unusually restrictive policies about discussing work outside the company. At best we can have ex-Apple engineers chiming in.

[pier25]

Maybe they do :P

[scarface74]

Jobs himself once said “Somewhere between the janitor and the ceo reasons stop mattering”

And the discussion about the quote on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2524855

[scarface74]

Do you really think if the head of engineering went to Tim Cook and said that Ive’s design wasn’t technically feasible he would have been told to ship it anyway?

[pier25]

I don't know, but I doubt it is that simple.

Maybe if the head of engineering had had another 6 months to test the keyboard design properly he could have concluded that it wasn't technically feasible. But at the time there was a lot of pressure to release a redesign of the MBP and probably the design of the case was already decided. In the end Apple wasn't able to make a proper keyboard to accommodate the specs but maybe it was too late to go back to the drawing board.

I'm speculating of course, but I very much doubt Apple are complete idiots. It's more probable that some circumstances forced them to release the redesign. It was a mistake of course, they should have only updated the specs of the 2015 model, maybe adding a TB3 port. But you know, hindsight is 20/20.

I imagine Apple has been working on a redesign with a new keyboard, but these things take a couple of years. Specially when the Mac is only 10% of Apple's revenue.

[dethac]

The thing with keyboards is that... well, for one, scissor switches are perfectly acceptable (the ones in the 2015 MBP and older, and pretty much all laptops today). Further, the thickness of the scissor mechanism can be made to be REALLY small. See: Acer Swift 7 (9.95mm thick, total), the XPS 13 (11.6mm thick, total) the X1 Carbon 6 (15.95mm thick, total), and pretty much any other Ultrabook. This is compared to the MacBook Pro, which is 14.9mm thick. Note that the X1 Carbon has TDP-up configured to 25W vs 28W on the MacBook Pro and the XPS 13 has TDP-up configured to 26W. Point being, thermal constraints did not force a keyboard redesign to fit the new form factor.

This feels like something Google would do: Take something that's perfectly functional, change it entirely, remove features, make it less functional, have it be buggy as hell, then release it while deprecating the old one. Now, sell it as an innovative new feature.

In short: the keyboard redesign does not appear to have any real reason behind it, and it's essentially change for the sake of change.

[pier25]

Maybe you are right. That would be consistent with the trashcan Mac Pro redesign.

Everyone was happy with the Mac Pro towers, a lot of people still use them today. The trashcan design IMO was more of an engineering/design statement at solving a self imposed problem rather than an existing one.

So, if rumors are to be believed, Apple is making a 180 on the new Mac Pro. Let's hope in a year or two we will have a new MBP with a good keyboard.

[atomical]

Sure.

Tim: Hey X, I appreciate the hard work you're doing. But I've been busy with other meetings and slagging off Zuckerberg again. LOL. Why don't you touch base with Jony Ive and see if you two can't come up with something?

[scarface74]

The MBP 2018 design issue was fixed by a firmware update a week later.

The AirPower debacle was anything but. They noticed they had an unfixable design problem and cancelled the project. The alternative would have been something similar to the Samsung/Galaxy Fold issue. Shipping a bad product.

Even the Mac Pro not being updated was halfway because they thought the IMac Pro bad external GPUs was the answer. Honestly, for most people it could be and has gotten great review. They had a change of heart.

[mikestew]

The alternative would have been something similar to the Samsung/Galaxy Fold issue.

Nope, there's another alternative: announce it when it's sitting in the backroom of every Apple store, like back in the old days. I'm sure Apple has their reasons for not doing that much anymore, but it would have avoided this very issue.

[scarface74]

Even in the Jobs era they pre announced the “3Ghz G5” that never happened and the AppleTV that did. Of course they preannounced the iPhone by 6 months.

[raverbashing]

That, or he is overridden by the design team and their failure to comprehend bending stress requirements or flexing fatigue in cables

[caycep]

There is a need of a new Bob Mansfield, apparently...