That’s because you were lucky enough to purchase one before they released the butterfly keyboard. Pretty much all macbooks released between 2016 and 2020 have had their keyboards stop working (or will suffer this fate) within a few years (2-3) from purchase. Apple being apple, they’re also impossible to fix, if you’re out of warranty it’s a full loss.
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He may not be mistaken.
Then again, while the 1st gen iPad was built indeed very solidly built, it was just thick and heavy. It was 45% heavier than the iPad Air - at the same screen size. On top of that, the 1st gen iPad was severely hampered by lack of RAM, which lead to one of the shortest support time spans in Apple’s recent history (barely two years!), so not a great, long-lived purchase.
He may be right as well.
Then again, he can count himself lucky that he didn’t buy the 2011 model that (on some configurations) had the GPU chips dying in droves. Or the 2012 / 2013 models with breaking hinges, which received an out-of-warranty repair programme as well.
If you compare 2008 MacBooks Pros (with their screwed together multi-part cases) with later aluminium “unibody” models it’s hardly a competition. The newer models - including the most recent ones - feel much more premium.
You aren’t a “Pro” model buyer but would do with the non-Pro MacBook? Ah, that brings back memories of the 2010 (and later) MacBook with the self-deforming plastic bottom covers…
This is, of course, anecdotal evidence - though so is your friend’s. I have followed Apple’s products very closely for years and do know widespread issues well (and first-hand). Based on that, I wouldn’t call their quality deteriorating as a general trend.
I wouldn’t say “pretty much all”, but it’s certainly a widespread problem.
They do provide a repair program - or extended warranty, if you will, for this particular issue. But it is limited to four years from date of purchase - so less than some people will (want) to use their devices.
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As far as I know, the late 2020 M1 Air/Pro Models don’t have the butterfly-keyboard problem. So shouldn’t be an issue for those purchases, right?
With Projekt Neptun I’d get an extended 3 year warranty:
It’s called a DQ care plan, where DQ is a independent company.
I can’t figure out if there is any benefits/drawbacks of this ‘plan’ other than the 1 year extension.
Afaik I’d get 1 year apple warranty and then 2 years DQ warranty.
They appraise it as being worth 100chf but you can simply deselect it.
Is this somehow a good deal I fail to understand or just insurance bloat I can easily do without?
That sounds heavily dramatised.
I don’t think it is. In my team at work everyone uses macbooks. All of us experienced keyboard failure, with one exception who broke his laptop by dropping it and got a new one. That’s 7 out of 8 people total, for context. Some of them just continue to use them as they are if not too badly broken (e.g. press a key and it appears typed multiple times), they’d rather do that than deal with the process of exchanging it.
It is a well known problem. This article suggests 30% failure rates: A workplace study shows MacBook keyboard failure rate of 30 percent - NotebookCheck.net News
My belief is that the article is an underestimation if you’re going to use it professionally. Likely most people don’t heavily use their laptops (i.e. >8h per day, min 5 days a week), so those probably last longer.
I do agree with you that their pre-2015 Macbooks are some of the best laptops ever made, I still have my 2014 one, works great.
Yes, I believe that is correct. Hopefully they didn’t introduce new issues 
yes the last generation intel Macbook air was terrible.
New Macbook Air M1 don’t actually have fan. It’s a bliss, super fast and battery lasts for a really looooong time. They claim 15h web browsing. I never measured but I’m sure it’s 10+h which is a game changer for any other previous windows laptop I had.
Super solid, no big deal the learning curve. It’s fairly similar and like a switch android >>iOS… I only miss the alt+tab in windows that works a bit differently.
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No butterfly keyboard on the 2020.
One year warranty extension.
Personally, if
- the notebook is your daily driver and/or you transport it and/or plug/unplug peripherals daily and
- you don’t have other warranty extension/insurance (through your credit card, for instance) and
- the warranty extension for the third years is (approximately) 5% of the device price,
I think it’s worth it to get the third year. Any repair will cost many times the cost of the warranty, even if it’s just a USB-C port with a bad connection (not that unlikely).
I would not get an extended warranty on an iPhone, iPad or iMac desktop computer (unless it’s a higher-end configuration with dedicated graphics. The M1s aren’t).
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I did this (more than 3 years after purchase), please read about my (a little bit mixed) experience below.
The (very) good - went to Apple Store, apart from reporting the problem with the keyboard, the guy saw some marks on the screen (coming from the keys when the screen is closed). He said that they have another replacement program for this, so apart from the keyboard they replaced also the screen. Internal cost for both was about 1 kCHF, I paid nothing.
The bad - after several months I still have some problems with the keyboard. As far as I know, somewhere between 2016-2020 they tried to mitigate the problem, by putting some (silicon?) membrane, but it didn’t solve the problem fully. On the other hand, at least for me, the problem is not that when it breaks it stays like this. It is always caused by some dirt etc. getting under the keys, so air pressure cleaning (never did it) or just pressing it harder (did it) should solve the problem.
Personally, I hope I won’t ever be forced to switch back to something else…
Yes, I think so. By the way - maybe it’s a good idea to wait a bit with a purchase - Apple is about to release new Macbook Pro’s (eg. 14"). I would wait and decide if I want to go for it. If not, for sure older models will get cheaper.
The new MACs don’t have butterfly keyboard so don’t get why all the fuss. Yes they made a mistake. I am sure we can find a lot of more terrible ones in the hundreds of Macbook copy cats running windows.
My wife has one from 2016 and no problems. I actually quite like the keyboard. Her white plastic Macbook from 2008 was still running like the first day…
Overall, they have much superior product that lasts for a lot longer. I was a bit of anti-apple for many years and I get the criticism, they lock you in their environment, limited to none upgrade options, they charge you 4x over the price to buy extra 256 GB of memory, but well, quality has its price. You either accept it or you don’t.
I also invite you guys to consider the 2nd hand market, Macbooks lose a lot less value then other laptops, so if you want to upgrade in a few years you may.
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I ended up buying a MacBook Air with 16GB and 1TB storage.
I’m still getting used to many things (“delete” key…) but quite satisfied until now.
Very impressive speakers, display and heat management (for being fanless).
Connectivity is obv. insufficient so I bought one of those to carry in my backpack: Satechi ST-SCMA2M (1 x HDMI, 60 W, USB A, USB C) - digitec
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Some considerations I stumbled upon when choosing the MacBook Air over the MacBook Pro.
Positive
- The Air is fanless and therefore seems likely to be more long-lasting (less dust, less moving parts) and is silent all the time.
- Cheaper.
- Slightly smaller and lighter.
Mixed
- The Pro has a Touchbar.
- The Pro has (in standard versions) one more core in the GPU. But doesn’t seem to make a big difference: Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1 Benchmarks: Should you get 7 or 8 GPU cores? - NotebookCheck.net News
Negative
- The battery life is considerably worse than the Pro. Still better than most competition atm but the MB Pro is just incredibly good. (M1 MacBook battery life so good Apple thought it was a bug - 9to5Mac)
- It’s worse for long sustained efforts. This matters if you do computationally intensive stuff. For other purposes tha MacBook Air is likely to perform just aswell as the Pro.
So I’d choose the Pro if you need a very long-lasting battery or sustained compute.
Otherwise the MB Air does just as well (or better) and you save a couple of hunderd swiss franks.
One reason for holding off from choosing a MB Pro at the moment:
(If i didn’t need a new laptop very urgently, I might have followed this advice. The 13.3" is just a tad small for me.)
FYI - If you can still wait a few days…they will most probably show the new MB Pro’s very soon…on 18.10 (Apple Events - Apple).
To be honest, I’m very rarely using touchbar, mostly to change the volume :D. So for me it doesn’t matter that much, apart from 2 things:
- Negative - no physical ESC key - not sure if it is solved already with new models?
- Very positive - TouchID - this is very important feature, again I’m not sure if it is already there with models without touchbar.
- Every current model of MacBook has a physical Escape key.
- Every current model of MacBook has a Touch ID sensor.
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Then no need for touchbar for me :). Anyway, I think the rumours are that the new MBs won’t have it.
I sometimes ask myself if the Touch Bar wasn’t just introduced on the wrong models, if they didn’t get it the wrong way round.
I could imagine that Touch Bar would be much more popular with consumers, casual users and students, i.e. the target demographics for the less expensive Air models. They‘d probably be more likely use it for Emojis etc.
„Pro“ (model) users, on the other hand, are probably more inclined to rely on muscle memory, quick shortcuts and haptic (typing) feedback.
But of course they can‘t just put such expensive fancy tech in the cheap models first/only and vice versa.
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Besides all the answers. Under my point of view the main question that you need to answer is what are you going to do, surfing, documents, edit video or photo…
In my case, My personal laptop I used for almost nothing. Facilitate Backup for media and watching movies. So I bought a second hand one. and in fact I am thinking to change it for a 2-1 or a tablet with keyboard.
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Great point.
On the apple-side, I actually stumbled upon the newer iPad Pros:
They also have a M1 chip and the touchscreen which the MacBooks lack. I think this might be one of the better options out there for e.g. students who mainly want to do simple web-browsing and note-taking on their machine.
It seems like a really good product at quite the low price.
The larger 12.9" version seems slightly less interesting at CHF280 more.
More than 800 bucks for browsing and taking notes, that’s overkill and not frugal/muatachian at all in my opinion.
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If you want to take notes digitally it might make sense, personally I don’t like it.
I’d argue 800 suissies is quite a good deal for browsing and note taking if it lasts for 4-5 years (e.g. your whole university time).
Probably not frugal, but not all mustachians are always, completely frugal
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