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By making the butterfly mechanism symmetrical Apple has done away with the scissor switch’s corner instability, which if pressed at a far corner would allow the scissor mechanism to actuate without actually triggering the switch. Instead I suspect Apple’s change was focused on key stability as well.Īlong with allowing for thinner keys, the other major improvement in the butterfly switch is key stability. That said, I’m not entirely convinced that Apple needed to switch mechanisms to reduce the keyboard thickness (though perhaps not getting 40% thinner), as we’ve seen other keyboards such as the Surface Pro 3’s type cover use some very thin scissor switches. Officially the butterfly switch is 40% thinner than Apple’s traditional scissor mechanism.
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The first of course is to reduce the size of the switch, allowing Apple to make the keyboard and resulting laptop thinner. The purpose of the butterfly switch is two-fold. Apple has forgone the traditional scissor switch in favor of a newly designed mechanism they’re calling the butterfly switch, which in the slow-moving world of keyboards is the first significant change in quite some time. Last but certainly not least however is the new key mechanism used underneath key, with like a number of other technologies is being first introduced on the MacBook. There is still some edge bleed, but now the lighting is much more focused on the symbols of the keys as opposed to lighting up the symbols and giving the keys a light border in the process. The individual keys are as bright as ever – and Apple has gone so far to calibrate the LEDs to make sure they’re uniform – but with the LEDs now under the keys the amount of light around the edges of the keys has been greatly reduced. Not unexpectedly, this also changes how the overall backlighting system looks. Apple tells us that this was done for size reasons, as the direct backlighting system was smaller than the fiber optic lighting system. The fiber optic lighting system that has been common in Apple’s designs until now has been replaced with a direct LED backlighting system, with each key having its own LED. Meanwhile under the hood Apple has reworked the backlighting mechanism. Ultimately I don’t find the MacBook’s keyboard to be any different to type on as far as key size and feel goes (even with my large fingers), but your mileage may vary.
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Truth be told, if not for the fact that Apple took the time to point this out in their reviewer’s guide I likely would not have picked up on either of these changes the wider keys are noticeable once you know what to look for, but only just. Meanwhile the keys are also have a deeper curve, which Apple tells us is 50% deeper. The keys are now 17% larger, with Apple having slightly reduced the amount of space between each key to compensate.
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Bottom: MacBook Air KeyboardĪpple has also changed the overall size of the other keys, though even regular Mac users may have trouble picking up on this. Meanwhile at the other corner the escape key has been slightly elongated so that it’s wider than a normal key, and the other function keys have each been slightly narrowed to compensate. In Apple’s older design the space above left/right is empty space, so nothing is being sacrificed for this, but touch typists accustomed to the short arrow keys are going to have to do some adapting.
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Of note, the “inverted T” design of the arrow keys has been removed in favor of full size left and right arrow keys, giving the MacBook a somewhat odd arrangement where left/right are larger than up/down, rather than being identical in size as before. Still a “full size” 78 key design that includes a top row of short function keys, Apple has made some changes to the keys themselves. Starting with the keyboard, on the surface the MacBook implements a keyboard very similar to the now-traditional MacBook Air keyboard, incorporating a few smaller changes since their last design. The driving factor of course is to further reduce the amount of Z-height these two devices take up, but there’s also a secondary focus on improving their functionality overall. Though both look the same – and largely behave the same – as Apple’s existing products, under the hood they’ve been doing some work to improve these input devices. One of the more interesting and not immediately obvious set of improvements to the MacBook come in the form of new internal mechanisms for the keyboard and trackpad. Getting Thinner: New Keyboard, Keys, & Switches