keyboard

Replacing the shift key on a Macbook 2015

Apple has done some amazing work in recent years refining the definition of ‘small’ and ‘thin’ computers. The Macbook 2015, which I previously reviewed/compared to my Macbook Pro , is definitely the poster child for minimalist full-capability computing.

Unfortunately, I broke one of the keys on my Macbook when I accidentally dropped the laptop on our hardwood floor. My attempt to repair this demonstrated the dark side of all that miniaturization- the Macbook 2015 is very hard to fix.

The first recommendation I found was to replace the entire top of the Macbook: keyboard, touchpad, and case assembly. In addition to this being rather costly (several hundred dollars), it just didn’t seem right. The other keys were fine, and as far as I could tell the electronic ‘bubble’ key mechanism was still working. Just the hinge and the key were broken.

In the end, I was proven right- it is possible to fix a single key without replacing the entire keyboard. Here is my experience of that process.

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Gartner “fellow” predicts mouse to be replaced by Wiimote and touch screen- FAIL

That mouse you use every day will be completely gone in five years. It will be entirely replaced by touch screen displays, facial recognition, and Wii-mote like devices that you wave around in the air. This is according to the predictive genius of some guy who works at Gartner and probably makes ten times as much as I do each year. Oh, and his full time job is making predictions about the future of technology.

For the record, the guy’s name is Steven Prentice– if he comes knocking at your door asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars for his predictive expertise, you might want to have some second thoughts. And maybe some third or fourth thoughts as well. Perhaps his quote was taken out of context: possibly he wasn’t saying mice and keyboards would be displaced on existing devices, but rather that for tiny or specialized devices like phones and PDAs we wouldn’t use mice and keyboards. If that’s what he meant, well, I’m sorry for the misunderstanding- be more clear next time, Mr. Prentice.

But I’ll be perfectly clear and as concise as possible- if he honestly believes that the mouse will be completely gone as an input control device within five years on desktop/workspace computers, and particularly if he thinks it will be replaced by touch screen and motion sensitive devices that we wave around in the air, he is going to be proven both completely wrong and astoundingly ignorant.

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Kitten editorializing…

I’ve been working a lot lately, scrambling to catch up with some application programming work.  Part of this is a result of being behind the technological curve in terms of the particular programming environment I’m working in (J2EE/WebSphere/Hibernate/Spring).  Suffice it to say I’ve been working some overtime.

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