Apple laptops, iPads, iPhones. All elegant, beautiful works of art, as well as being (for many, anyway) a joy to use.
They’re thin, they’re light, the battery lasts hours. The screens are amazing. Did I mention they’re thin and light?
It’s the latter that seems to be causing issues these days.
In an effort to make them as thin as possible, we got MacBook Pros that had keyboard keys with far less travel, and arguably a pain (literally) to type on. They also had a pesky habit of getting debris underneath, causing the keys to stop working entirely. Apple eventually issued a “Keyboard Replacement Program“, but by then it was too little, too late.
Apple “fixed” that by putting a layer of silicon underneath in the 2018 models, but apparently that doesn’t completely fix the problem either.
And that brings us to Apple MacBook Problem Du Jour: Flexgate.
You see, now folks are finding that after a couple years and likely a few hundred opening/closings of the display lid, the fragile cable connecting the display to the logic board is going bad.
All in the interest of thinness and lightness. 🙂
I’m currently still rocking a 2014 era MacBook Pro, and it’s still thin and light, but (knock on wood) the keyboard still works, the display still works, and I’ve not had any $600 repairs yet. I’d be happy had they just stopped here and said “yup, that’s good. That’s the thinnest we can go before affecting reliability”.
Then of course there’s another “Gate”, this one a fresh new “Bendgate” that affects the new iPad Pros. You see, they’re so thin, they bend with little effort, and are even arriving from the factory pre-bent (for convenience, one can only assume :D)
Apple, just…..stop it. Make your products durable. It’s not like they’re remotely cheap. It’s insulting to the customer to spend $1200-$5000 on a laptop, and have it develop dumb issues like this over time. It’s insulting to the customer to have someone buy a $1000 tablet, and have it arrive already bent. Or have it easily bend, just by carrying it in a backpack.
The hardware is cool and all, but if it can’t take a “beating”, i.e. carrying it carefully in a padded case, then I don’t want any part of it anymore.
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