From Chaim Gartenberg at The Verge:

But the deeper issue isn’t that the butterfly switches often break; it’s the flawed design goals that led Apple to make a bad button in the first place. Apple chose to make an entire keyboard full of buttons that resulted in a more aesthetically pleasing design with shorter travel and a thinner overall laptop, rather than making ones that are mechanically functional. And it nearly wrecked an entire generation of Apple’s laptops.

Apple is a massive company that has a ton of stakeholders but I honestly believe that one of the biggest mistakes Tim Cook made was to give the reigns to Jony Ive with no real counterweight. With a lot of the other voices in the room silenced or gone (such as Scott Forstall), Apple leaned way too hard into form over function, and many of their products have suffered as a result. iOS 7 was a mess and many of the hardware products from 2015-2020 were also way too focused on how something looked rather than how people used them.

Ive was a visionary in a ton of ways and he’s not completely to blame for many of the issues Apple have had with their hardware and software design in the last half decade. But with strong leadership at the top, a team of rivals approach tends to get better results. Let’s hope the next 5 years are more focused on users and their needs as opposed to just making things as thin as possible.