…we learned a little bit about the acoustics and the psychology of what is pleasing when you click a key…

 

CNET: What work went into getting the Magic Keyboard into a laptop design?

Phil Schiller: To make this new scissor mechanism work appropriately in a notebook, we had to adapt it to the angle, which is different in a notebook than in a slanted desktop design for ergonomics. And it had to work in a design that had a backlight, which the notebook has that desktops do not.

While the team was doing it, they discovered there were some things we liked about the butterfly keyboard, like the way it created this whole stable key platform at the top. We wanted to enhance the switch mechanism to support that kind of a feel, and we learned a little bit about the acoustics and the psychology of what is pleasing when you click a key. We had to advance the rubber dome design underneath the key to create the right feel and pressure. We had to increase the travel in the notebook back to about a millimeter because a lot of pros like a little bit longer travel, yet fit it into a thin and light design.

Throughout the process, the team reexamined the ideal size key cap — you can make it too big, and there’s not much space between them — and people felt that that we wanted to provide a little more space between the keys than the butterfly mechanism has for optimal feel for professional typists.

There’s a bunch of learning that happened. Some because of moving the desktop keyboard to the notebook and some because we just learned more along the way and wanted to further advance the technology.

Just for a keyboard.

Origin: Apple’s Phil Schiller on reinventing the new MacBook Pro keyboard
vía: faq-mac