As a professional writer, the clickity clack of my MacBook’s keyboard — the famously loud and defective 2016 model — is a near ubiquitous sound in my home. Lately, however, that sound has been accompanied by exasperated sighs and a fair share of four-letter words.
My spacebar is broken and I’m not trying to be dramatic but this is hell. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I freaking hateit.
“But Tim,” you’re asking, “how are you writing this blog with a broken spacebar?” Well, I’m writing it slowly, dear reader. You see, every once in a while I can give the spacebar a good, hard thwack and I’ve got, hopefully, a few paragraphs of writing before my keyboard inevitably sticks again. When the spacebar is sticky, and the thwack fails me, I can press the spacebar with tremendous force and that works but basically involves me punching my keyboard. If all else fails, I have to pry the key up withmyfingernail. [Thwack]. My thumb is actually sore from all this. So that’s fun.
Shit-it’s-stuck-again.
[Thwack.]
OK, anyway, you don’t realize how impossible life online is with a wonky spacebar until you have a wonky spacebar. It’s not fun!
A quick list of things I can’t do, or cannot do well, on my laptop right now:
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Type this blog.
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Slack my coworkers and create legible messages.
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Tweet. And I love to tweet. I’m a sick human being who loves to tweet.
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Google the life story and living relatives of Rasputin.
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DM myself notes which is how Iremembe[Thwack] sorry about that… how I remember anything.
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Pause a YouTube video in the simplest way.
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Get through a single day of work without uttering the phrase, ‘”This stupid fucking keyboard is going to kill me, I swear.”
I am certainly notalone [THWACK] in this struggle. The MacBook keyboards, especially from this period of time, are famously awful. Google it and you’ll find constant keyboard struggles. Sticky keys, fully stuck keys, keys falling off. I mean, hell, this is my work laptop. My personal laptop is also a MacBook and guess what? The T-key fully fell off last year. I’ve lived with that quite some time.
I’m at my wits’ end. It’s especially insulting considering MacBooks are expensive as all get out. I generally like them, or at the very least I’m used to them, and inertia is a powerful force in our consumer decisions. I’ll get another MacBook because it’ll be easy to figure out and I know it already.
But at this point I cannot imagine buying another MacBook. Apple can make an amazing chip, have a gorgeous screen, or improve performance until the cows come home. But do I really even need that stuff? I write articles, I tweet, I google, I stream, that’s about it. I can do all that from my phone.
So sure, you can make the best laptop ever but if I can’t hit the fucking spacebar reliably what the hell are we even doing here? I’ve gotten three straight paragraphs now without my key sticking and it feels like a miracle. I cannot stress how stupid that is. This laptop started at $1,799 when it was announced in 2016. And something so simple, its keyboard, is garbage. Its keyboard! Is garbage!
OK, I’m getting angry and that’s silly. Being mad online is never good for anyone. It’s just a keyboard. I don’t need to get freak out. Worse things happen all the time and it’sreally [thwack] notthat[thwack] bad.
Fuck.
