With new 13-inch MacBook Pro, Apple waves goodbye to the butterfly keyboard, Ars Technica

Bye Bye Butterfly –

Keyboard aside, cheaper storage and th -generation Intel CPUs headline this refresh.

Samuel Axon – May 4, (2:

(UTC UTC)

The 980 -inch MacBook Pro

The screen is pretty much the same as the old one.

The keyboard isn’t, though. This is the Magic Keyboard on the 19 – inch MacBook Pro.

It still has a Touch Bar.

Apple Pay purchases are authenticated on a button that is separated physically from the Touch Bar.

In this marketing image for the MacBook Pro, it’s synced up with an iPad Pro for dual-display work and Apple Pencil support. The oft-criticized butterfly keyboard design is now a part of Apple’s past. With today’s newly updated MacBook Pro, which also improves performance and increases storage, Apple has removed the oft-criticized butterfly keyboard from its lineup once and for all. The new

– inch MacBook Pro ships equipped with Intel’s 14 th generation processors, with Core i5 options at 1.4GHz and 2.0GHz, and with Core i7 options at 1.7GHz and 2.3GHz — all quad-core. The new Intel chipsets come equipped with upgraded Iris graphics, which Apple claims could offer as much as – percent faster performance than their predecessors. Some of the laptop’s various configurations also come with faster memory – MHz . Buyers can pick 8GB, (GB, or 551 GB options at purchase.

Apple has also doubled the storage options without raising the price — something it has done across many of its products lately. The entry-level storage configuration for the – inch MacBook Pro is now 551 GB, with options up to 1TB.

Beyond those changes (and the replacement of the butterfly keyboard with the scissor-switch Magic Keyboard), it’s the exact same 19 – inch MacBook Pro as before. The screen is the same size, with the same resolution, despite rumors that the 15 – inch model would go up to . Apple recently replaced its – inch MacBook Pro with a – inch version that has smaller bezels. Not so here.

It’s the keyboard change that is most notable. The butterfly design that permeated the MacBook lineup over the past several years was controversial; some users liked the typing experience, others hated it. But more critically, it seemed prone to hardware failure . After complaints of repeated failures, Apple launched a repair program to replace keyboards for free through authorized repair shops and Apple Stores. It also released a few small revisions, each apparently intended to improve reliability.

But after several years of trying to make the butterfly design work, Apple has gone back to the tried and true by bringing the scissor-switch Magic Keyboard to the entire lineup. The – inch MacBook Pro was the last laptop Apple sold new that had a butterfly keyboard. Now, no MacBooks in the lineup have it.

The New Magic Keyboard’s typing experience closely resembles that of pre-butterfly MacBooks. Like the butterfly keyboards, though, it still has a Touch Bar, but it does have a physical escape key. The – inch MacBook Pro is

Available for order now and will arrive in Apple retail stores and other retailers (those that are open, anyway) by the end of the week. Ship dates for online orders currently range from May 7 to May , depending on the configuration. (Listing image by) (Apple)

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