The "butterfly mechanism" keyboards never bothered me. I actually like the feel of my MBP's keyboard. Likewise the software Escape key never bothered me.

But honestly, the design of the arrow keys is super important. With the full-height left/right keys it's hard to quickly find the arrow keys by feel. The new (old) arrow key design is honestly what I'm most interested in with this computer after the 16" screen.

I am with you as far as the butterfly mechanism (aside from robustness issues), but for me the arrow keys are fine.

The bigger issue for me is lack of physical volume controls. I think it's extremely important for any device which produces sound to have a physical mute button. This would be less of an issue if the touch-bar were more reliable, but it often doesn't respond immediately, or else gets frozen and unresponsive, for instance with the volume slider up.

I hadn't given it much thought until your post, but on my 2017 13" MBP, here's how I seem to do it:

1. Put my right hand in approximately the correct location.

2. With my middle finger, find the space between the up/down keys.

3. Now my right hand's index finger is above the "left" key, and my right hand's ring finger is above the "right" key.

I know the subject has been beaten to death but still, as someone who was pleasantly surprised by the butterfly keyboard, I am living a nightmare with my just 2 month old MacBook Pro with keys starting to lose travel and I feel like it’s only a matter of time before bein completely stuck. To the point I’m now afraid to use the keyboard, feeling like everytime I use it without the external keyboard keys become more stuck. I’m so disappointed and was misguided on how the new generation had less problems.

exactly. arrows are something that always bothered me in my mac , not butterfly ( to some extent yes ) or not esc.

How is it hard? They're at the bottom right so you can find them by feel pretty quickly.

The lady and right keys are easy. But up and down are difficult. With the half height left and right keys it’s easier to find the up and down keys. The down key is between left and right and the up key is an island (or a peninsula at least). Does that make sense?

I bought the last half height model when I upgraded my MBP 13”.

I can find the up and down easily because they are shaped differently. They are the only keys split horizontally, and the connecting edges are curved inward unlike the other keys. I find them easy to feel fore. I am glad the new keyboard solves this problem for others though, I don't think the full-height left/right keys are particularly better.

But when not looking at the keyboard, having full height left and right arrow keys makes them feel just like the nearby Option and ? keys. Having a distinct arrow-key-group shape makes them easier to locate by touch.

You can't feel the break in between the up/down arrow keys by touch?

It's not always easy. If I need to quickly move to the arrow keys (I touch type, so no looking!), I have about 80-85% success finding the right key on the first press... with the inverted-T layout, that's about 99%.

There's something weird about the way my brain handles the key being the same size as the option key next to it, and the fact that the tops of all those keys are exactly the same.

If you touch type then learn the OS X shortcuts of CTRL-B, CTRL-F, CTRL-P, CTRL-N, far more efficient than moving your hand over to the arrow keys and works in (virtually) all places you are editing text.

It doesn’t work in the menus for example. The cursor keys are still important.

I don't think I have anything special configured for my Mojave setup and these seem to work for me. In particular, I use Ctrl + Shift + F2 (on my external keyboard) to focus the menubar and then I can use Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f to navigate back (left) and forward (right) between menus, Enter to select a menu, and then Ctrl-n or Ctrl-p to navigate next/previous entries in the menu, with Enter again to select.

Interesting! I always use Cmd-Shift-/, which focuses the search field in the help menu, and Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f do not escape from there.

But focusing the menu bar with Ctrl-F2 does indeed allow me to use Ctrl-f and Ctrl-b. And after hitting Return to open a menu, I can use Ctrl-n and Ctrl-p to navigate down and up.

Interesting.

I will have to try more, but I still think that there are places in macOS where Ctrl-b and Ctrl-f do not work, and I have to use the arrow keys, instead.

When you're searching for the arrow keys, the break is one thin line only in the middle of one key. When the keys are half height, there is are two large gaps to find. The difference is a few mm vs almost a cm and 3 targets to find vs one.

I hate the full-size left and right arrow keys because it means I can't easily use my sense of touch to find the arrow keys. I mistype them all the time now, even after months of use. That was never a problem with the previous inverted-T design.

Seconded. I frequently mistype L/R as up/down, and this is infuriating when striking 'command' + arrow to go to the beginning/end of the line (an extremely common op for me), and instead going to the top/bottom of the file, completely losing my place.

(Of course that particular problem would be less of an issue if the keyboard had home/end/pgUp/pgDn, which I'm still sore about, years after they got rid of them).

Arrow keys are so important I might almost want them all full size, in a "+" configuration.

I wonder -- is this for a 13" or 15" laptop? I'm curious because after this thread I was checking on how I tend to find the arrow keys. I have a 13" model and finding the edge of the computer itself seems to help me find the appropriate keys.

15".

It's a good 1.5" from the right arrow key to the edge.

That’s what I was guessing. I’d bet most of the people who don’t like the current (I guess now, the old) arrow key arrangement also have a 15”.

It’s honestly not something that I ever really noticed with a 13”.

Sure, but it's still a maladaptation to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Many PC laptop keyboards have full-size keys for all four arrows. Tiny keys for a feature I use so frequently is user-hostile, whether it's 2 or 4 of them.

It’s not about the size for me. Sure the full height inverted T is easy to use. The half height inverted T also works. But the one that isn’t inverted T is difficult.

They also usually have an awful-looking extra row just for the arrow keys. And FWIW, I find that the inverted-T arrangement is even easier to quickly find by touch than full-height arrow keys.

are you a touch typist? because lifting your hand, and repositioning it onto a grid of undifferentiated keys is MUCH harder when you can't feel the shape of the inverted T and can't see it (because you're not looking at the keyboard or because you're visually impaired).

Remember when Apple's keys had a dot on the D and K instead of a line on F and J?

Remapping CapsLock+hjkl to arrows IS productive.(oh, and CapsLock+Space to Enter, too!)