Yesterday at the Oscars, Taika Waititi destroyed Apple’s keyboards in a fun 1-minute rant after getting his Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for Jojo Rabbit.
Waititi was answering a journalist’s question about the Writers Guild of America’s possible strike, asking what are the needs that writers should raise in the next round of talks with production houses. His answer in a nutsell: Get Apple to fix its keyboards.
Taika Waititi jokes about what writers should be asking for in the next round of talks with producers: “Apple needs to fix those keyboards. They are impossible to write on. They’ve gotten worse. It makes me want to go back to PCs” #Oscars pic.twitter.com/vlFTSjCfZmFebruary 10, 2020
After saying “Apple needs to fix those keyboards“, Waititi launched into a hilariously absurd rant about how Apple keyboards are terrible. Seemingly a Mac user, he said that the keys get stuck and the bouncing action is so bad that they almost make him want to get a PC.
”Those Apple keyboards are horrendous,” he continued. And of course he singled out the MacBooks. He mimicked the size of their keyboard, demonstrating how they force you into an unnatural writing position and caused him shoulder and elbow problems. He went on and and on, ending with “we just need to fix those keyboards.” The “WGA should step in and do something,” he finished to laughs in the Oscar’s press corps.
The MacBook keyboard debacle
Of course, someone could have told Waititi that he could buy a new $2,399 MacBook Pro 16-inch, which is the first Apple laptop in years with a decent keyboard that apparently matches the performance of the company’s desktop keyboards.
But until last year, every Apple MacBook had mediocre keyboards. And the fact is that Apple’s laptop keyboards are not good, like Waititi says. They're perhaps the worst in the industry, with bad tactile feedback, keys that stick, letters that repeat themselves, and continuous technical problems that forced Apple to admit the troubles and extend the MacBook’s keyboards guarantee.
Apple has had a dodgy keyboard in the market for five years now. Apple introduced the butterfly keyboards in March 2015 — which instantly led to user complains. Then it tried to fix it in a second-generation in October 2016, but the complaints only continued as Apple continued to ignore users.
In May 2018, a Change.org petition asked Apple to recall all MacBook Pros with butterfly keyboards and, that same month, a class-action lawsuit was filed. Later in June, Apple tried to finally appease users by offering an extended free replacement program. which still didn’t fix the situation but offered a band-aid to an obvious faulty design problem.
Then in July 2018 Apple introduced a third revision of the butterfly keyboard, claiming that this was the good one. But, as we discovered on April 2019, the Basecamp chief technology officer claimed that almost half of the company's MacBook Pros with third-generation keyboards were reportedly failing.
Surprisingly enough, Apple still sells MacBooks with these keyboards, which still get stuck keys, just like the replacement that Apple claimed were going to mitigate these issues. The company will allegedly kill the faulty butterfly keyboard by mid-2020, according to rumors.
No wonder Waititi is pissed off enough to slam Apple after his Oscar win, albeit in a cheeky tone designed to deflect the journalist’s question.
