The butterfly keyboard had design flaws. This is a well known and well documented fact. There is literally an Apple keyboard repair program for the butterfly keyboard, and this new MacBook pro uses a different keyboard design altogether.
When something rises to the level of a recall, especially for Apple (who denied that logic board issues were an issue on two separate models of MBP for me for months before issuing recalls), it rises a bit beyond "anecdote".
I may have not been verbose in the first post, but it was intended to be less about the technical and more about how there's this weird demand culture just because we know a couple people who have a similar issue.
Slightly larger anecdata then: I have a group chat with some friends where we were discussing the 16" MBP announcement this morning. One computer out of six has (so far) gotten by with a reliably performing keyboard.
Some of the others haven't gotten bad enough to deal with shipping them off for repair, but that doesn't mean they're working acceptably.
But I'll concede it's possible that this all a coincidence and we're a very unlucky sample. There's probably not a good source of hard numbers, since Apple only know about the ones who were able to deal with getting it repaired. I read that they're trying to do next-day turnaround for in-store keyboard replacements now, but not all of us live anywhere near an Apple Store.
Specifically take note of the 2018 numbers. 6 of 13 keyboards having problem, and if every single one of those was purchased the day the 2018 model was released, they're a maximum of 10 months old when the poll was taken. Many of them are likely newer than that. 6 out of 13 in less than a year. Even if there's a biased sample in who responded to this, that's a lot of bad keyboards.
Anyway, I’m glad to see a new keyboard design, and if I seem salty about it that’s because I’m personally annoyed at my 2016’s keyboard and all Apple can do about it is replace it with another of the same keyboard that will probably fail in the same way again.
EDIT - corrected my group figures. One person has a working keyboard. And for what it's worth, another person who works in IT hasn't seen an overwhelming failure rate in their office (knock on wood, he notes). But most them are using external keyboards for data entry (with numpads), so the internal keys aren’t used heavily.
His own MBP is counted among the failed ones though.
