Moments after accepting his first Academy Award for the best adapted screenplay, Jojo Rabbit writer and director Taika Waititi lashed out at Apple’s flawed keyboards while taking questions from the press backstage. When asked what issue the Writer Guild of America should address in their next round of talks with producers, Waititi shared his growing frustrations with MacBooks’ keyboards — and demanded Apple fix them.
Backstage at the #Oscars, Taika Waititi says that the WGA should ask Apple to make the MacBook keyboard easier to type on. pic.twitter.com/mpwSFDPplO
— IndieWire (@IndieWire) February 10, 2020
Waititi further highlighted the absence of enough travel on Apple’s Butterfly keyboards and said he might soon switch to a Windows PC as “the bounce-back for your fingers is way better.” Despite improving over the years as they should, he added that Apple’s keyboards have gotten worse with each generation.
“Hands up who still uses a PC? You know what I’m talking about. It’s a way better keyboard. Those Apple keyboards are horrendous. The Writers Guild of America needs to step in and actually do something,” Waititi continued.
Waititi went on to bring up a health condition called Occupational Overuse Syndrome (or Repetitive Strain Injury in the U.S.), which he is suffering from and he believes has been aggravated due to thinning and narrower laptop keyboards. OOS is often found among typists and writers and is primarily caused by overuse of fingers and wrists movements.
While Apple’s keyboards have been the center of several, inflammatory blog posts as well as lawsuits, this is the first time a celebrity has called them out. Taika Waititi is likely referring to Apple’s controversial last-gen Butterfly keyboards that have troubled MacBook buyers.
Apple, in spite of multiple iterations, struggled to mend its fragile mechanism and ended up returning to the same scissor-switch keyboard found on its 2015 notebooks for the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro. It’s unclear whether Waititi was aware of it, though.
The company is expected to expand that to its 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air and kill the Butterfly keyboard for good later this year. We don’t know when Apple plans to release them yet or whether it has planned any other notable changes for its line of notebooks. A recent Digitimes report claimed that it will arrive in the first half of 2020.
