Casey Johnston of The Outline and formerly of Ars Technica notes that the keyboards are so terrible, she wouldn’t even buy the MacBook Pro on sale. In fact, she sold her 2016 system and now relies on an older MacBook Pro and a PC she built with the proceeds from selling the original.
DaringFireball’s John Gruber writes, “This keyboard has to be one of the biggest design screwups in Apple history. Butterfly keyswitches are a design failure that should be abandoned. After three significant revisions, Apple’s butterfly keyswitches remain as controversial and unreliable as ever. At best, they’re a compromise acceptable only on the ultra-thin 12” MacBook, and only if nothing else fits.
They have no place in Apple’s mainstream or pro computers. In short, nobody — nobody — likes these keyboards. Apple has published an instruction guide to how to clean your laptop’s keyboard, which basically involves hunting up a can of compressed air and wishing you’d bought a different laptop. It’s one thing for a person like myself to poke fun at Apple — I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a fan of Apple’s 2016 dongle-happy refresh. But the heat from all corners of the net suggests that the system really does have a design flaw.
For years, the standard defense of Apple products has been that they justify the pricing with superior design, but the company has been stacking up its metaphorical death by a thousand cuts for several years now. The iPhone 6 Plus failed early because Apple mis-designed the phone. When Apple ran into battery problems with the 6s, caused in part by years of aggressively pushing the envelope on single-threaded CPU performance, its response was to choke iPhone performance invisibly and tell no one. The Mac Pro trashcan, far from being an iconic triumph, is a failed iteration in a design language Apple is abandoning. The bloom, in other words, is more than off this particular rose.
A rollable display also allows for even easier portability and creative functionality. From a design standpoint, it can enable a creation of new phone shapes and internal applications that would never be possible with a standard mobile device. Even if this technology doesn't offer immense practicality, it would still set a futuristic precedent that no smartphone has ever witnessed. That alone makes a flexible display worth it.
One of the biggest challenges in creating flexible displays is the cost of manufacturing and production. When this technology becomes available and is introduced onto smartphones, then you can expect the initial price of said phone to be very high to the point where it's out of reach for most consumers.
Of course that's nothing new when something revolutionary is generated, but it'll take time before costs begin to decline. The other disadvantage is developing the device. The components of a smartphone are going to be very difficult to maneuver when incorporating a flexible display. The batteries would have to be redesigned to match the curved screen along with new plastic/glass materials that can function within the innards of the phone.
Such a costly and lengthy process is why the iPhone 8 would easily be the costliest iPhone by a significant margin. There's no other way around it if Apple wants to make this happen. We've already mastered the smartphone, but there's always something out-of-the-box that creators want to introduce. So what's the next step, Although maybe everyone is rushing things a tad, but I digress.
Regardless of speed we're living in an exciting time, and the future is brimming with possibilities. The speed of innovation is moving so rapidly that OLED displays are already considered to be old news while the next, big thing is presently in the works. But if you're not ready for science fiction, then you can have a taste of scientific fact when the iPhone 8 rolls out (no pun intended) with their most ingenious creation yet.
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