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.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.