Goodbye, AirPower :(
It's only early April and it's already been a tough year for Apple. Besides the admission that the company simply could not ship the wireless charging pad that it had been teasing for a year and a half, there was also the restatement of the company's holiday quarter results, and an Apple event featuring TV content that showed remarkably little of that content, leaving some folks scratching their heads.
With nine months left in 2019, Apple's surely got more challenges ahead of it. It's got multiple subscription services to launch later this year, high expectations for the upcoming iPhone, since smartphone sales have begun slowing, and the next step in what will likely prove a significant shift for its two major software platforms.
On top of all of that, Apple has a small handful of products that are potentially trouble waiting to happen. Though none alone—or perhaps even all three together—would likely cause the company to tip into the abyss, they still could end up being things that Apple ends up spending more time discussing than it really wants to.
The keyboard to the kingdom
Much attention has been given to the keyboard on Apple's recent laptop Macs, some of it even written on that very device, occasionally without the benefit on 'e' or 'r' keys. There's a lot of discussion about whether the keyboard has a high failure rate, a small but vocal minority of users who have run into problems, or lots of people who have had problems but haven't reported them. Regardless, it's clear that something is afoot, and it's not good.
Apple's response, thus far, has largely been to tweak the design of the keyboard in subsequent models, touting better key stability and quieter typing, without ever really speaking to the reliability issues that users have been complaining about. We're now on the third-generation butterfly keyboard, but those updates have brought little relief to those who have suffered the most from keyboard failures.
More recently, Apple has issued a weak apology, saying only a "small number" of users have encountered problems, and then quickly whiplashing to point out that "the vast majority" of users are loving the new keyboard. LOVING. IT.
Sure, if most customers are okay with the keyboard, then these issues may not make a dent in Apple's overall MacBook sales, but the challenge here for Apple is that many of the people who have been the most vocal about it also wield a lot of influence.