Designed to fail is preposterous. Apple lost a ton of money due to that problem, both directly in paying for repairs, and indirectly in damage to their stock price.
It's pretty clear what happened, and it's unfortunate but banal: someone went too far with making the key mechanism as thin as possible, and all plastic to make it easier to manufacture. Ends up the plastic wasn't strong enough for the little pins in the mechanism.
That's it. Just an ordinary design mistake. Embarrassing but no conspiracy.
FWIW they've resolved it. The keyboard on this M1 MBA is perfectly fine.
> It's pretty clear what happened, and it's unfortunate but banal: someone went too far with making the key mechanism as thin as possible
I see it as a symptom of the Jony Ive ideology, untethered from realty by Jobs, poisoning Apple in the early 2010s. iOS7 flat UI, overthin devices, keyboards.
Signs are pointing that Apple is recovering from this (new aTV remote).
I don't see any evidence that Apple's stock price was affected. Apple can ship any garbage (they shipped a keyboard they knew was defective for three years) and people will buy it because they're locked in to Apple's services, another reason they're pushing services so hard at the expense of the rest of the company.
The new keyboard is what they should have had the last few years. A refinement of the scissor switch keyboard from the glory days of the MacBook. It's great.
It's pretty clear what happened, and it's unfortunate but banal: someone went too far with making the key mechanism as thin as possible, and all plastic to make it easier to manufacture. Ends up the plastic wasn't strong enough for the little pins in the mechanism.
That's it. Just an ordinary design mistake. Embarrassing but no conspiracy.
FWIW they've resolved it. The keyboard on this M1 MBA is perfectly fine.