269: ‘Maximally Thin’ With Casey Johnston

The Talk Show With John Gruber

Very special guest Casey Johnston joins the show to talk about the butterfly MacBook keyboard saga and the just-released 16-inch MacBook Pro, with its all new scissor-switch keyboard design.

Links:

• Casey Johnston on Twitter.
• “Ask a Swole Woman” — Casey’s column for women on fitness and health, now at Vice.
• Marco Arment’s first-look review of the 16-inch MacBook Pro, with a nifty graph illustrating the differences in key travel and spacing of various keyboards.
• Dr. Drang’s gentle improvement of Marco’s graph.

The saga of Casey’s writing regarding MacBook keyboards:

• Oct 2017: “The New MacBook Keyboard Is Ruining My Life”.
• Apr 2018: “Don’t Buy the MacBook Pros Even on Sale, in My Opinion” — Casey sold her MacBook back to Apple.
  • (My link to that article.)
• May 2018: “Apple Knew Its Computers Were “Defective,” Sold Them Anyway, Suit Alleges”.
• June 2018: “Apple Admits Its Computers Are Broken” — the beginning of the Keyboard Service Program.
  • Apple’s Keyboard Service Program.
  • My quip: “I can’t recall any Apple related story that one writer has owned the way Johnston has owned this MacBook keyboard story.”.
• March 2019: Joanna Stern: “Appl Still Hasn’t Fixd Its MacBook Kyboad Problm”.
• April 2019: “Apple Owes Everyone an Apology and It Should Start With Me, Specifically” — Casey bought a 2018 MacBook Air.
• May 2019: third-generation butterfly design with “material” change.
• Apple’s support document on how to use compressed air to maybe hopefully fix a butterfly-switch MacBook keyboard.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.