the high cost of clickysmall

Well, I've used a new-school MacBook Pro (previously) as my work computer for the last 2/3 of a year, and I've decided I don't like the keyboard after all.

The key travel and clickiness are mostly fine, though for extended use I've found I really do prefer the older keyboards. (Which surprised me!) The real problems are:

• The glitches. You know the "hold for menu of diacritics" mode? It triggers randomly while I'm typing at speed, which drops a random vowel. I HATE THIS.

  I found the delay setting, but it only affects the delay to trigger it on purpose. The random triggers are still instantaneous. It might have gotten less frequent after I blew out the keyboard with an air can, but that brings us to #2:

• The fragility. The tiniest speck of garbage can now send a key completely to hell. It used to take a LOT to make key stop working or glitch out, but now... ugh. And you can't really take it apart to clean it like before, so you have to blast some canned air and pray.
• Full-height arrow keys. I use the left arrow key a lot for switching tabs (opt-cmd-arrow) or moving the cursor word-at-a-time (opt-arrow), and they changed the shape so it's indistinguishable from the option key and you can't find it by touch. UGH. The half-height ones were perfect, IDK why they had to go and fuck this up.

• The touch bar. Interesting idea, but so incomplete that it's inferior to the old f-keys for nearly every use case. And I underestimated how annoying the soft esc key was gonna be.

  I would prefer physical buttons with OLED screens in the caps. Sure, you couldn't have sliders (only rarely useful), but that would keep everything else good about the touch bar AND you could tell whether you'd pressed the damn button or not.

Others have said all that already (except maybe the diacritics glitch, I can't seem to find anything about that), but since I wrote something nice about these keyboards previously, I wanted to make a point of retracting it. You should wait to buy one of these laptops until they make some major improvements to the core interface.

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I don't really mind the USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 thing, tho. Having to get all new adapters is bullshit, but once you have them it's fine. (Except for the Thunderbolt vs. Mini-DP thing with the tb3-tb2 adapter [don't even ask], that's 100% shenanigans.) But maybe that's because I only upgrade computers like every five years, so I ALWAYS end up having to get new adapters.