The "butterfly" keyboard on Apple laptops has been resoundingly criticized.

Apple has ditched the keyboard for the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, as my colleague Anthonio Villas-Boas noted.

I've been using a older Apple MacBook Air for about six months — and I've found that keyboard isn't all that great. It's a good thing that Apple has gotten rid of the "butterfly" design.

Still compared with a manual typewriter from the the 1960s, the MacBook keyboard — butterfly or better — is a miracle of modern technology.

I've owned a number of Apple laptops, however, and the butterfly keyboard is probably my least favorite — a far cry from the keyboard I remember most fondly, on an ancient iBook G4.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.



Hate your MacBook butterfly keyboard? You aren't alone — complaints about the keyboard are all over the internet, and at Business Insider we've found the design to be wanting.

Fortunately has listened. For the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, the butterfly has been replaced by a scissor design.

I've been using a new MacBook Air for about six months, and while typing on the keyboard is super-fast, I've also noted a decline in accuracy from the desktop keyboard I had been using, and from Apple laptops I've owned in the past.

As it turns out, I also possess the state-of-the-art for portable word processing from the 1960s: a Smith-Corona manual typewriter, which I still often use. I thought it might be both amusing an illuminating to compare that heavy-duty, hard-working keyboard with what modern technology has given us.

So here we go: