One Piece Ficathons!

The spacebar on my 2019 MacBook Air has finally given up the ghost for good, at least to the extent of having large dead zones at either end and requiring a lot more effort to press, and since repairing it would mean a full-keyboard replacement I decided it was time to simply throw in the towel and END MY SUFFERING and get a new fucking laptop.

I am now armed with a 2020 MacBook Air (I was going to go for a current m4 in the hope of avoiding it being hit by the obsolescence hammer too soon, but it turns out that after the 2020 model they got rid of the wedge shape, and unfortunately given that my no. 1 requirement from my fic machine is that it be comfortable to type on for 6+ hours at a time the prospect of a bump under my wrists was genuinely a dealbreaker…) and would therefore like to give an official send-off to the Plague Upon My Life, the Blight Upon My Days, the worst keyboard Apple (or indeed anyone) has ever made, the butterfly keyboard.

Which was so fucking bad that in 2022 Apple settled the class action lawsuit about it for $50 million, and I truly wish I’d heard about this at the time, because I, too, deserve court-mandated restitution for six fucking years of This Bull Shit! (“Apple Owes Everyone An Apology and It Should Start With Me, Specifically”—ME TOO, Casey Johnston, me too.)

Please picture the following as a montage of this keyboard’s greatest hits, with a soulful classic rock ballad playing the background and lots and lots of audio-muted swearing and hair-tearing on my part:

1. After about 6 or so months of use the original keyboard was having such catastrophic issues with double-press and no-press keystrokes (see the WSJ article typed on such a keyboard and left unedited for an extremely accurate sample of how bad this was) that I was obliged to crawl out to the Apple store at the nearest indoor mall in February 2020 despite already being extremely aware of the pandemic and really not wanting to go, so as to make use of Apple’s free butterfly keyboard replacement program, launched in 2018 in acknowledgement of just how badly they fucked up this keyboard design. (To give credit where credit is due, whatever it was they apparently did as part of that replacement actually did completely resolve the no-press/double-press issues, but oh my god. Oh my god.)

2. For the subsequent 5 years please picture me having to continuously lift the laptop 75° to vigorously blow under the keys to get them to stop sticking due to tiny pieces of dust stuck under the mechanism, every. Single. Day.

3. In addition to this process there were at least a dozen (two dozen?) occasions (genuinely I have lost count of how many. so many. so many and all of them were agony) when I was obliged to spend anywhere from 15 minutes to well over an hour prying up keys with a needle or a guitar pick to clean underneath them, which was particularly excruciating because when they get stuck it can be really very difficult to pry up the keycaps without snapping the tiny plastic hooks that go under the mechanism! Which I inevitably did on multiple occasions.

4. ...As a consequence of which I was, over the course of 2023 to 2025, obliged to buy new keycaps for the left Command key, the N key, the spacebar, and the spacebar again (the second time also with replacement hinge, which somehow worked 100% less well and got more stuck than the broken hinge, resulting in the new one going in the trash) which comes out to OVER SIXTY DOLLARS spent just on replacement keycaps for this terrible fucking keyboard.

ANYWAY. Dear 2019 MacBook Air, you served me lo these 6 years! Under the circumstances to say you did it well would probably be a bit of a stretch, but. You did serve. Rest in fucking pieces, butterfly keyboard, you gave me so much more grief than any piece of technology should reasonably be permitted to do and I am FINALLY FREE.