4 years seems like a bit of an insult in this scenario. These laptops are very expensive bought new and this is a defect; you would think they would repair them for life or at least as long as the life of the laptop.
I've been using the same MBR laptop since 2013 for personal use and haven't found any reason to switch. I would be pretty mad if I owned one of these and had to get it fixed, or wanted to resell it and had a lower resell value because of the keyboard.
It also feels worse because they continued manufacturing them for years after they knew there was a problem. 4 years smells similar to the planned obsolescence scandal in iPhones, as it implies that the lifetime of one of these is 4 years which is just not the case in my experience. They are hoping people will say "my laptop needs a new battery and a new keyboard, might as well drop another 2 grand for a new one" instead of keeping their perfectly good laptop.
The most plausible theory for why they stuck with the butterfly board that long, is that Jony Ive didn't leave the company until 2019.
Word is, it was his baby, and he was convinced that if they just kept tweaking it, they would get it right eventually.
The keyboard I'm typing on feels identical to every other MacBook keyboard I've owned, going back to the titanium PowerBook G4. I expect it will prove comparably durable: never had a key skip or double-press on any of them, and I go hard on my equipment.
I actually liked the crispness of the butterfly keys, but absolute reliability is a hard requirement and they just weren't.
I've been using the same MBR laptop since 2013 for personal use and haven't found any reason to switch. I would be pretty mad if I owned one of these and had to get it fixed, or wanted to resell it and had a lower resell value because of the keyboard.
It also feels worse because they continued manufacturing them for years after they knew there was a problem. 4 years smells similar to the planned obsolescence scandal in iPhones, as it implies that the lifetime of one of these is 4 years which is just not the case in my experience. They are hoping people will say "my laptop needs a new battery and a new keyboard, might as well drop another 2 grand for a new one" instead of keeping their perfectly good laptop.