Technology

Yes I am very late to this. But I am also very annoyed so I am adding my voice to the now sustained chorus of complaints about Apple redesigned Mac keyboard: How very much it sucks. Truly, madly, deeply.

This is the keyboard that Apple &completely redesigned& in 2015, in its quest for size zero hardware, switching from a scissor mechanism for the keys to what it described then as the &new Apple-designed butterfly mechanism& —touting this as 40% thinner and 4x more stable.

Reader, there is nothing remotely beautiful and butterfly-esque about the experience of depressing these keys. Scattershot staccato clattering, as your fingers are simultaneously sucked in and involuntarily hammer out a grapeshot of key strikes, is what actually happens. Itbrutalist and unforgiving. Most egregiously itnot reliably functional.

The redesigned mechanism has resulted in keys that not only feel different when pressed vs the prior MacBook keyboard — which was more spongey for sure but that meant keys were at reduced risk of generating accidental strikes vs their barely-there trigger-sensitive replacements (which feel like they have a 40% smaller margin for keystrike error) — but have also turned out to be fail prone, asparticles of dust can find their way in between the keys, as dust is wont to do, and mess with the smooth functioning of key presses — requiring an official Apple repair.

Yes, just a bit of dust! Move over ‘the princess and the pea&: Apple and the dust mote is here! ‘Just use it in a vacuum& shouldn&t be an acceptable usability requirement for a very expensive laptop.

Apple has also had to make these keyboards quieter. Because, as I say, the act of using the keyboard results in audible clackclackery. Itlike mobile phone keyclicks suddenly got dizzingly back in fashion. (Or, well, Apple designers got to overindulge their blue-sky thinking around the idea that ‘in space no one can hear you type&.)

Several colleagues have garnered dagger glances and been told to dial it down at conferences on account of all the key clattering as they worked. Yet a keyboard is made for working. Ita writing tool. Or it should be. Instead, Apple has made a keyboard for making audible typos. Itshockingly bad.

As design snafus go, this is up there with antenna-gate. Except actually itmuch worst. You can&t not ‘hold it in that way&. You can&t press keys on a keyboard radically differently. I guess you could type really slowly to try to avoid making all these high speed typos. But that would have an obvious impact on your ability to work by slowing down your ability to write. So, again, an abject mess.

I&ve only had this Oath-issued 2017 MacBook Pro (in long-held-off exchange for my trusty MacBook Air, whose admittedly grimy and paint-worn keys were nonetheless 100% functional after years of writerly service) for about a month but the keys appear to have a will of their own, whipping themselves into a possessive frenzy almost every time they&re pressed, and spewing out all manner of odd typos, mis-strikes and mistakes.

This demonic keyboard has summoned Siri unasked. (Thanks stupidly pointless Touch Bar!) It has also somehow nearly delivered an ‘I&m not interested& auto-response to a stranger who wrote me at length on LinkedIn to thoughtfully thank me for an earlier article. (Fortunately I didn&t have auto-send enabled so I could catch that unintended slapdown in the act before it was delivered. No thanks to the technologies involved.)

At the same time Caps Lock routinely fails to engage when pressed, as if itpractising for when it&ll be broken. It equally countlessly fails to disengage when re-pressed. ‘Craps Out Lock& more like. I fear itbeset by dust motes already. Which is hard to avoid because, y&know, everything in the world is made of dust.

The keyboard also frustrates because of the jarring juxtaposition of having individual keys that depress too willingly, seeming to suck the typos from your fingers as letters get snatched out of sequence (and even whole words coaxed out of line), coupled with a backspace key that refuses to perform quickly enough (I&ve had to crank it right up to the very fastest setting) so it can&t gobble up the multiple erroneous strikes quickly enough to edit out all the BS the keyboard is continually spewing.

The result A laptop thatlightning quick at creating a typo-ridden mess, and slow as hell to clean it up.

In short, ita mess. A horrible mess that makes a mockery of the Apple catchphrase of yore (‘it just works&) by actively degrading the productivity of writing — interrupting your work with pointless sound and an alphabetic soup of fury.

The redesigned keyboard has been denounced by Apple loyalists such as John Gruber — who in April called it &one of the biggest design screwups in Apple history&.

He precision-hammered his point home with this second economical sentence: &Everyone who buys a MacBook depends upon the keyboard and this keyboard is undependable.&

Though it was Casey Johnson, writing for The Outline, who raised the profile of the problem last year, kicking up a major stink over her MacBook keys acting up (or dead) after a brush with invisible dust.

Since then keyboard-related problems have garnered Apple at least one class action lawsuit.

Meanwhile, the company has responded to this hardware headache of its own design like the proverbial thief in the night, quietly fiddling with the internals when no one was looking. Most notably it slotted in a repair earlier this year, when it added a sort of silicon gum shield to wrap the offending butterfly mechanism, which is presumably supposed to prevent dust from wreaking its terribly quotidian havoc. (Though itno use to me, right here, right now, with my corporate provisioned 2017 MBP.)

We know this thanks to the excellent work done by iFixit this summer, when it took apart one of Appleredesigned redesigned keyboards and found a thin rubberized film had been added under the keycaps. (Looking at this translucent addition, I am reminded of Alien designer HR Gigerbiomechanical concoctions. And of Ashrobotic hard-on for poking around inside the disemboweled facehugger. But I digress.)

Shamelessly Apple tried to sell this tweak to journalists as solely a fix for those noisy key clicks. iFixit was not at all convinced.

&This flexible enclosure is quite obviously an ingress-proofing measure to cover up the mechanism from the daily onslaught of microscopic dust. Not — to our eyes — a silencing measure,& it wrote in July. &In fact, Apple has apatent for this exact techdesigned to &prevent and/or alleviate contaminant ingress.&

And the date on Appleingress-proofing key-cap condom patent September 8, 2016. Read that and weep, MacBook Pro second-half 2016, 2017 and first half 2018 owners.

So if, like me, you&re saddled with a 2017 (or earlier) MBP theresweet F.A. you can do about this fatal design flaw in the core interfacing mechanism you must daily touch. Abstention is not an option. We must typo and wait for the inexorable, dust-based doom to strike the space bar or the ‘E& key — which will then make the typing experience even more miserable (and require a trip to an Apple store to swaddle the misbehaving keys in rubber — leaving us computerless, most probably, in the meanwhile).

There is an entire novel written without the letter E. I propose that Applefailed keyboard redesign be christened the ‘Gadsby‘ in its honor — because, ye gads, itawful.

This is especially, especially frustrating because the MacBook Air keyboard was so very, very good.

Not good — it was great. It was as close to typing perfection I&ve come across in a computer. And I&ve been typing on keyboards for a very long time.

Why mess with such a good thing! Marginally thinner than what was already exceptionally thin hardware is hardly something consumers clamour for.

People are far more interested in having the thing they bought and/or use actually doing the job they need it for. And definitely not letting them down.

(Or &defienmtely nort letting them down& as the keyboard just reworked the line. I really should have saved every typo and posted a mutant mirror text beneath this one, containing all the thousands of organic instances of ‘found poetry& churned out by the keyboardinner life/poet/drunk.)

If shaving 40% off the profile of the key mechanism transforms an incredible reliable keyboard into a dust-prone, typo-spewing monster thatnot progress; itfolly of the highest order.

Offering free repairs to affected users, as Apple finally did in June, doesn&t even begin to fix this fuck up.

Not least because thatonly a fix for dust-based death; There isn&t a rubber film in the universe that could make typing on these keys a pleasing experience.

What does it tell us when a company starts making the quality of its premium products worse Especially a company famed for high-end design and high quality hardware (Moreover, a company now worth a staggering$1tr+ in market capitalization)

It smacks of complacency, misaligned priorities and worrying blindspots — at the very least, if not a wider lack of perspective outside the donut-shaped mothership. (Perhaps therebeen a little too much gathering around indoors in Cupertino lately, and not enough looking out critically at a flaking user experience… )

Or else, well, it smacks of cynical profiteering.

Clearly itnot a good look. Applereputation rests in large part on its hardware being perceived as reliable. On the famous Steve Jobs& sales pitch that ‘it just works&. So Apple designing a keyboard thatgreat at breaking for no reason at all and lighting fast at churning out typos is a truly epic fail.

Of course consumer electronic designs won&t always work out. Some failure is to be expected — and will be understood. But what makes the keyboard situation so much worse isApplefailure to recognise and accept the problem so that it could promptly clean up the mess.

Its apparent inability (for so long) to acknowledge there even was a problem is a particularly worrying sign. Having to sneak in a late fix because you didn&t have the courage to publicly admit you screwed up is not a good look for any company — let alone a company with such a long, rich and storied history as Apple.

More cynical folks out there might whisper itdesign flaw by design; A strategic fault-line intended to push users towards an upgrade faster than they might have otherwise have unzipped their wallets. Though Apple offering free keyboard repairs (also, albeit, tardily) contradicts that conspiracy theory.

Yet the notion of ‘built in obsolescence& persists where consumer computing hardware is concerned, given how corporate profits do tend to be locked to upgrade cycles.

In Applecase itan easy charge to level at the company given its business model is still, in very large part, driven by hardware sales. So Apple doing anything that risks encouraging consumers to feel itintentionally making its products worse is also folly of the highest order.

Apple does have some active accusations to deal with on that front too. For example, a consumer group filed a complaint of planned obsolescence in France late last year — on account of Appleperformance throttling older iPhones— something the company has faced multiple complaints over and some regulatory scrutiny. So again, it really needs to tread carefully.

Tim CookApple cannot afford to be slipshod in its designs nor its communication. Jobs got more latitude on the latter front because he was such a charismatic persona. Cook is lots of good things but henot that; hecloser to ‘safe pair of hands& — so company comms should really reflect that.

Apple may be richer than Croesus and king of the premium heap but it can&t risk tarnishing the brand. The mobile space is littered with the toppled monuments of past giants. And the markets where Apple plays are increasingly fiercely fought. Chinese device makers especially are building momentum with lower priced and highly capable consumer hardware. (Huawei displaced Apple in second place in the global smartphone rankings in Q2, for example).

Applerivals have mercilessly cloned its slender laptop designs and copypasted the look and feel of the iPhone. Reliability and usability are the bedrock of the price premium its brand commands, with privacy a more recent bolt-on. So failing on those fundamentals would be beyond foolish, with so many rivals now pushing cheaper priced yet very similarly packaged (and shiny) alternativesat consumers — which also often offer equal or even greater feature utility for less money (assuming you&re willing to compromise on privacy).

When it comes to the Mac specifically, it clearly has not been Applepriority for a long time. The iPhone has been its star performer of the past decade,while growing its services business is the fresh focus for Cook. Yet when CookApple has paid a little attention to the Mac category itoften been to fiddle unnecessarily — such as by clumsily reworking a great keyboard for purely cosmetic reasons, or to add a silly strip of touchscreen thatat best distracting and (in my experience) just serves up even more unwanted keystrikes. So thrice blighted and the opposite of useful: A fiddly gimmick.

This is worrying.

Apple is a company founded with the word ‘Computer& in its name. Computing is its DNA. And, even now, while smartphones and tablets are great for lots of things they are not great for sustained writing. For writing — and indeed working — at any length a laptop remains the perfect tool.

Thereno touchscreen in the world that can beat a well-designed keyboard for speed, comfort and typing convenience. To a writer, using a great keyboard almost feels like flying.

You wouldn&t have had to explain that to Jobs. He honed his Mac sales pitch to the point of poetry — famously dubbing the Mac a ‘bicycle for the mind&.

Now, sadly, saddled with this flatfooted and frustratingly flawed mechanic, itlike Apple shipped a bicycle with a pair of needles where the pedals should be.

Not so much thinking different as failing to understand what the machine is for.

Yesterday, as part of some of its newest programming for startup founders, the startup incubator Y Combinator posted a new interview with its widely revered founder Paul Graham. The apparent idea was for Graham to share some deep thoughts about startups with fellow founder and current YC partner Geoff Ralston, though thetwo spend much of the (entertaining) interview discussing Grahamformative career and his cofounders in his early startup Viaweb, and no wonder; one of them is famous hacker Robert Morris, who became the first person convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Much of the advice that Graham did eventually dispense to founders in the audience was interesting to us, however. Graham talked, for example, about his views on competition,which can essentially be boiled down to the idea that companies fail owing to poor execution, not because of me-too startups. In fact, said Graham, though companies worry about competitors, YCdataset suggests that &maybe one out of 1,900& of its portfolio companies has been killed by a rival thattackling the same problem.

Graham also repeated another point that we&ve heard him make in the past, which is that determination is far more important than intelligence when it comes to becoming a successful startup founder. Take away determination bit by bit, and you have &this ineffectual but brilliant person,& said Graham. But subtract out intelligence bit by bit and &eventually you get to some guy who owns a bunch of taxi medallions but hestill rich. Or [who has] a trash hauling business, or something like that. You can take away a lot of smart.&

Yet our favorite part of the sit-down centered on the audiencequestions. One of these was a question about how founders deal with the varying commitment levels of their cofounders, which often change over time based on how the company is faring, as well as external events. Grahamanswer was simply for founders to ask themselves: &Would I rather have 30 percent of this [one] person, or 100 percent of another person& (He said in the case of Morris, he would have taken 10 percent of him over 100 percent of another individual.)

Asked about the right founder DNA, Graham also offered up an unsurprising insight but one we personally hadn&t heard him say before, which is that YC isn&t so crazy about funding people who&ve worked at &certain& large companies for long periods, as it has learned over the years that they aren&t natural founders. He didn&t specify what the tipping point if for YC, but he offered that &if you&ve worked for a large company for 20 years, you might not be a founder, unless you were forced to [stay there] for visa reasons. Because if you were the kind of person who would make a good founder, you wouldn&t be able to stand working for a large company for 20 years.&

Related to this same question, Graham was asked about the trend in Silicon Valley to employ — and fund — ever-younger individuals. Itclearly a trend that Graham finds objectionable.

Noting that he doesn&t &think on behalf of YC anymore& — not since handing the reins to President Sam Altman in early 2014 — he said YC &better not be [funding high school students], because that would be an evil thing to do, There are plenty of high school students who could start successful startups,& he said, &but they shouldn&t . . . Because if you start a successful startup, like, the footloose and fancy-free days of your life are over. You&re working for that company.&

At this point, Ralson piped in to say that YC has &funded high school students,& adding that it isn&t looking to encourage them but has funded them &only because they are already going& with their companies. That didn&t stop Graham from warning that people who start companies at too young an age are engaging in &premature optimization. Whenyou&re in high school and even in college, you should be figuring out what the options are, not picking one option and running with it . . . itgood to mess around with a whole bunch of things in your early 20s, whether this messing around takes the form of college or something else.&

Itnot just a matter of losing out on precious time that could be better spent on exploration, he suggested. The real risk in taking the leap too soon is that it could work. &Starting is startup is like catching a dragon by the tail if it works. Be careful at what point you do that.&

You can check out the full interview here.

Amazon promisedto breathe new tech into the relationship with Whole Foods after putting a$13.7 billion ring on it one year ago. So how did that promise shake out

At the time, Amazon said the goal was to make &high-quality, natural and organic food affordable for everyone.& Bananas, avocados and even tilapia was going to be cheaper than before. Prime members would receive increased benefits with discount rewards and Amazon drones would be delivering packages right to your door.

Okay, that last bit was not promised — though we&re not the first to speculate on that possibility in the future.

A bunch of other Amazon offerings involving delivery options were also mentioned, including the getting of Whole Food groceries through a then new Amazon Fresh grocery delivery program and Whole Foods private label products would be made available through Prime Now and Prime Pantry. Further, Amazon lockers would be showing up at select stores to make pick ups and returns easier for Amazon customers. And, of course, new jobs would be created to handle all the new infusion of technology.

Soon customers started to see Amazon Echo devices popping up in stores, urging people to install them in their home for easier grocery ordering through voice command. Echo dots lined the walls and could be found surrounded by produce. Amazon promised to deliver more devices to try in-store ahead of purchase as time went on.

Since the launch, &customers have already saved hundreds of millions of dollars,& according to Whole Foods co-founder and CEO John Mackey. &So whether itbetter prices on your weekly shop, saving time through delivery from Prime Now or taking advantage of incredible weekly deals for Prime members, the overall customer experience is richer and more seamless than itever been,& he continued.

I&m not sure the average customer would see the experience as &richer and more seamless& but the changes are noticeable. Walking into my local Whole Foods, the Amazon branding is everywhere from the deep orange lockers off to the side, the large, green Amazon Fresh coolers greeting me at the entrance to the parking lot and rows of bags ready for pickup and delivery via Amazon workers.

A large &Prime Member Deal& sign hangs down from the ceiling, greeting me at the front of the store. Beyond, therethe produce, once fresh and free of rot with all organic labeling. Now Itunclear. I used to argue the &whole paycheck& prices were worth it for the better quality produce. Lately, I&ve had to throw a bunch of stuff out because it just doesn&t last as long or look as good. Not everything is organic.

Other shoppers have noticed the same dip in quality across the U.S., along with missing products or a lot of out of stock items they&d been buying for years at their grocery store.

Itbeen called the &conventionalization& of Whole Foods by Wall Street investment bank Barclays, which also noted there had been some comments from Mackey about cultural &clashes& during his appearance at the American Production and Inventory Control societyannual conference.

On the flip, Amazon has managed to add some nifty integrations for Prime members including club member style sales prices and five percent cash back for those purchasing groceries with their Prime Visa card. You want to do one better, just download the Amazon app to your smartphone, use the code given and then purchase with Apple pay using your Amazon Prime credit card for maximum benefits. Of course, thatonly for those all in with the system.

Adding to that, therethe super fast two-hour delivery option (in 20 cities for now, with more to come this year, according to Amazon) and grocery pickup so you don&t even have to wander through the store to get everything you need (although, I am one of those who likes picking out my own produce and wandering through the store sometimes),

I&ve also enjoyed using the integrated partnership to order Whole Foods items straight from my Amazon Fresh account (a lifesaver in those early days of postpartum when it was impossible to get out of the house). Before the integration I could use Instacart but had to order from each store separately in different orders. With Amazon, I can order from various stores, including Whole Foods through my Amazon Fresh account all in one order and then choose a time for delivery.

Therestill some bumps with that process — you can&t order every item available in Whole Foods, just what Fresh offers that week through the Amazon platform. The bags are also large and often don&t fill up to their full potential, leaving a lot of waste. But thatlike complaining you can&t get good WiFi on an airplane. Itfrustrating but you are flying through the sky and messaging people on the ground. Similar, you are ordering food through the air waves and it shows up at your door step. In the grand scheme, itamazing!

Anyway, yes, there are more conveniences for Amazon Prime members and further integrations with technology to make the shopping experience easier. It does also seem Amazon has hired more workers to fulfill the needs this technology creates. At my own market it seems tough to tell who is an Amazon worker rummaging through the aisles for listed items and whojust shopping for themselves these days.

Is the marriage working Tough to tell at this point. Those promised changes may seem exciting for both parties but between disappointed shoppers and a &clash& in culture it may not have been what Whole Foods faithful wanted. Still, at least some vendors have said they&ve seen an increase in sales and volume of products sold since the acquisition, despite the drop in prices. And Mackey, comparing his love for his wife with the relationship said in a recent interview &I don&t love absolutely everything about my wife, either, but on balance I love, like, 98%. Thata pretty good ratio, based on my previous relationships.&

It might not even matter what loyal Whole Foods customers think. The acquisition gives Amazon an opportunity to introduce its 100 million Prime members to the grocery store it envisions — one that could drop organic, fossil fuel free groceries via drone at their doorstep in the future.

While ithard to know how the partnership has impacted Amazonbottom line overall, we do know sales going up and to the right is a good thing. We still need to see how this relationship performs over time but one year in looks promising.