Apple Vice President of Worldwide Marketing on Wednesday highlighted the Magic Keyboard found in the new 16-inch MacBook Pro. Schiller stated that the new keyboard has been in development for some years.
“[The Butterfly keyboard] had some things it did really well,” said Schiller, “like creating a much more stable key platform. It felt more flat and firm under your finger – some people really like that, but other people weren’t really happy with that.”
“We got sort of a mixed reaction,” he continued. “We had some quality issues we had to work on. Over the years, we’ve been refining that keyboard… and a lot of people are much happier.”
In spite of using the word “notebooks,” Schiller would not specify whether the new keyboard would be en route to any other Mac other than the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
“I can’t say today,” he said. “We are continuing both keyboard designs.”
Schiller also went on to state that the entire keyboard had been rethought and worked over.
“Nothing got away without some scrutiny and discussion and debate,” he said. “That includes the Touch Bar. There is a fairly large number of customers who use the Touch Bar and see great benefit in some of its features, but there were also some complaints. If I were to rank the complaints, No. 1 was customers who like a physical Escape key. It was just a hard adaptation for a lot of people.”
“We decided that rather than just remove the Touch Bar and lose the benefits some people get,” he continued, “we could instead add the Escape key.”
The Escape key has once again resurfaced as a physical key instead of as part of the Touch Bar display. There is also a larger gap between the Touch Bar and the rest of the keyboard.
“Since the X and Y of the MacBook Pro is a teeny bit larger —up 2 percent —we wanted to use some of that little bit of extra space between the top of the number of keys and the bottom of the Touch Bar,” says Schiller, “because there was a minor complaint, I wouldn’t say major, that some people accidentally would touch the Touch Bar when they meant to hit the number keys.”
The new Magic Keyboard has emerged after three years of complaints regarding the butterfly keyboard, which was first seen in the MacBook and migrated to the MacBook Pro in 2016. User issues ranged from an unpleasant typing experience, to issues with reliability.
The 2016 MacBook Pro feature the worst failure rates in the line, with Apple implementing incremental changes in successive generations as well as offering a repair extension program that offered free repairs for impacted keyboards to four years past the first purchase of the device.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro is available to order now and retails from $2,399. It will appear in stores starting on November 15th.
Via AppleInsider and CNET