Apple introduced the butterfly keyboard mechanism in 2015 along with the 12” MacBook. The keyboard was supposed to help minituarize laptops even further than they already were. As a result, the MacBooks did turn a little more thin and light – the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air.
However, the butterfly keyboard was/is just too difficult to work with as the keys are too delicate when it comes to handling dust efficiently. A little bit of dust when stuck between the keys would result in the complete halt-down of the key and some users even reported that sometimes a single press of a key would result into multiple key presses.
Time to fix the core issue
Over the years, Apple introduced various repair programmes but none of them were able to actually fix the core issue. As a result, the company finally gave up on the keyboard design and brought back the scissor switch keyboard design back this year on a new 16” MacBook Pro.
Apple is expected to bring the scissor switch keyboard mechanism to all its MacBook sometime in the future. However, the question is “when?”. A lot of old MacBook Pro users have skipped the butterfly keyboard MacBook Pros to avoid the problems and same is the case with some MacBook Air users.
Apple could very well be working on a 13” MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air with the scissor switch keyboard. We expect the 13” MacBook Pro to be released as early as in the first quarter of 2020 as the company has already refreshed the larger version of the MacBook Pro.
However, it’s unclear as to when Apple will release a new MacBook Pro which will not have the problematic keyboard. Well, usually the company updates the premium products and then takes a gap before refreshing the whole line.
Apple could very well wait till October of 2020 to release the new MacBook Air. But it would be very bad on part of Apple to hold off an important switch (the keyboard).
