Apple's new MacBook, with its shallow keyboard and Force Touch trackpad, makes major usability compromises for thinness
Mistake One — MacBook “One”, 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and Hops for scale. — I've had mixed luck with impulse buys. — As a kid, I impulse-bought Marble Madness for my Sega Genesis.
Context & Ripple Effects
This Marco.org takedown lands a month after Ars Technica's early review of the same machine, which flagged the single port and Broadwell-era performance lag but praised the display and trackpad. Where Ars split the verdict, Marco frames the shallow keyboard and Force Touch trackpad as outright usability regressions made purely for thinness — the first sharp articulation of what would become a running criticism of Apple's laptop design philosophy.
The arc matters because the compromise didn't stay contained to one wedge-shaped MacBook: the following year's 13-inch Pro with function keys extended it to ports and pricey dongle headaches, before the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro hands-on framed the keyboard fix as a 'de-Jony-Ive-ification' — features restored that reviewers said should never have been lost.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the new MacBook face a direct trade-off the reviews now document on both sides: a great display and trackpad experience versus a shallow keyboard and life with one port.
- Apple's design team gets its clearest early signal that thinness-first engineering is reading as a regression to the reviewers who shape purchase decisions.
Second-order effects
- As Apple carries the same minimalism into the Pro line, the dongle-and-adapter ecosystem becomes a required purchase category — pricing power shifts to accessory makers for connections laptops used to include.
- Rival PC makers gain a differentiation opening on keyboards and port selection, since the premium-laptop benchmark is now visibly compromising on both.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple eventually walks the compromises back — as the 2019 keyboard restoration shows — while the tension resurfaces downstream, with the 2026 MacBook Neo's flimsy keyboard repeating the same thinness-over-input trade at a budget price point.
- Laptop design settles into a recurring cycle: thinness pushes input quality down, reviewer pushback pulls it back, and each generation re-litigates the same trade rather than resolving it.
The trend: Apple's laptop line is caught in a recurring thinness-versus-usability cycle in which keyboard and port compromises are shipped, absorbed by buyers, and later partially reversed under sustained reviewer pressure.