Perhaps the kindest thing we could say about the Apple MacBook Butterfly keyboard is, thank you for your service.
While it may have ushered in an era of thinner, lighter, more portable laptops, we can truly say it never actually sparked joy.
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Now with the latest update to the 13 inch MacBook Pro, it looks like Apple is out of the butterfly keyboard business because now they've taken it out of the 16 inch MacBook Macbook Pro late last year, the 13 inch Macbook Air back in March, and now the 13 inch Pro, they've all been replaced with the Magic Keyboard.
That's what Apple calls their universal keyboard design now.
And I call it universal because You can find it in the standalone keyboards that come with IMAX and Mac minis.
And in the clip on keyboard for the iPad Pro also called the magic keyboard and now in every single mac book a year ago, it was a completely different situation.
All of the MacBook laptops had the old butterfly style keyboard Although what was a butterfly had evolved over time and arguably gotten better and faster, last year I was so concerned with the level of anti butterfly sentiment online that I wrote a story called in defence of the apple keyboard.
And defence may have been a strong word.
I was not Actually defending the butterfly keyboard all that much, although I may be retconning that a little bit now that they've finally gotten rid of it.
What I was saying was that most people were able to use these keyboards myself included in many different models I reviewed over the years without that much trouble.
And yes, there are people who had stuck keys and people who hadn't had their system prepared an apple Certainly recognize this after a while and change their repair policies so that anybody with a butterfly keyboard who had an issue could go in and get their machine serviced or replaced the keyboard fixed etc.
But that was a vocal minority cuz People don't go on Twitter to report that their products are working largely as intended.
Over the years I've extensively used many Mac books with Butterfly keyboards, something like eight or 10 of them at least all long term.
Only ran into one serious stuckey problem which was very annoying.
I did fix it myself by following the old online advice of turning it upside down and fidgeting with the key.
Then it popped out.
Maybe I'm just lucky but that was the one major keyboard problem that I had.
Now part of this is because the butterfly evolved over time.
It started out in it's worst possible version with the 12 inch MacBook back in 2015.
And in order to fit everything into this very slim, very light laptop, they came up with a new keyboard design.
And frankly It wasn't great, the keys fell down was painted on you, you could barely feel yourself touching them.
They were stuck keep problems immediately for some people.
Over the years however, the butterfly evolved and it changed and it got a little bit better the second year and it got a little bit better the third year and when they moved it to other products like the MacBook Pro Pro and air it got better still, the most recent version from 2018 added this rubbery membrane under the keys and the keys were just a little bit more traveling a little bit more click to them but that rubber membrane would keep out dust and debris and crumbs and really solved a lot of problem.
Problems if they had launched with that 2018 version of the butterfly keyboard.
I don't think that you'd really hear a lot about it.
But you know, maybe the butterfly was really our fault all along.
Funnily we didn't insist on eating over our keyboards were crumbs and debris could get in under the keys.
If only we didn't insist on feeling a satisfying kalakh When we press down on a key instead of being happy with barely there, click of the butterfly where sometimes you weren't sure if you even depress the key at all.
But you know what?
We're not robots.
We do eat over our laptops.
We do want to feel what we're typing when we type it.
So here we are.
The butterfly keyboard has gone to live with that farm upstate, where the 12 inch MacBook lives and the 11 inch MacBook Air and the magsafe connection.
They're all up there, they're fine.
No, you can visit them.
And now the butterfly has been replaced by the magic keyboard all over Apple's life.
Arthur C. Clarke once said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Maybe that's also true of keyboard engineering.
