
The only reason there isn't more MacBook keyboard confusion is that these are the only MacBooks left after the 12- and 15-inch prunings this year. keyboard fragmentation! Now the 16-inch MacBook Pro has this new and improved keyboard, while the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro both have the clearly inferior butterfly version. Still, peace has yet to be restored to the MacBook keyboard galaxy. There will no doubt be many longer-term verdicts from many opinionated quarters for this new keyboard, but in my first-24-hours opinion, it's pretty great. But really, stop getting cookie crumbs on your laptops, you monsters. A new rubber dome is under each key, and the individual keycaps can be removed and replaced (I have not tried that yet), which should at least mitigate any problems from dust and debris causing stuck keys. Likewise, the key travel (a term often used as shorthand for how far one can depress a keyboard key, although it's really the distance before a key press activates) is a substantial-feeling 1mm, which feels like a happy medium. If anything, this new design fuses the two, with keycaps that are smaller in surface area than the butterfly version, but larger than the old-school version. Seeing all three side by side, it looks more like the butterfly design, with low-slung, wide keys. The feel is definitely closer to the modern MacBook keyboard than the classic one.
