MacBook butterfly keyboard problems

Over the last three years, I've occasionally been using a MacBook Pro 13-inch 2018. Unfortunately, it has been the worst laptop experience of my existence!

It was an upgrade to a MacBook Pro 13-inch 2015, and aside from the Apple Touch Bar, it would be fair to consider it superior to its predecessor. However, I started noticing something unusual once I started using it for writing - I kept making mistakes.

Like many, I'm a touch typist and quite comfortable using most keyboards. If I switch to a new keyboard, it sometimes takes some time to get used to the shape of the keys, the spacing between them, and how they feel. So at first, I assumed this unusual feeling came from typing on a brand new keyboard. Over time, I noticed a pattern in the mistakes I was making. Sometimes I would double type a letter, e.g. e, or I would miss the letter entirely.

It starteed gtting on my neervs.

My typing slowed down as I was often typing in anticipation of these mistakes, and it became an overall distraction.

I found similar reports shared online, and I was relieved at the suggestion that it might be a hardware issue with the "butterfly keyboard", rather than a deterioration of my ability!

Through this search, I also discovered an attempt to address the issue with software. It's called Unshaky, and it attempts to dismiss erroneous key press registrations, i.e. those that occur no later than x milliseconds after the previous one. It's not perfect and it doesn't solve all the issues, but in the following screenshot you can see some of what it caught over just a few months:

Key press statistics

It has been a terrible experience in general, and I look forward to leaving this machine behind me. What follows is a list of keyboard complaints taken from the Unshaky README¹

Unshaky https://github.com/aahung/Unshaky. Featured image taken from the repo. ↩

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MacBook butterfly keyboard problems

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