I’ve had my Macbook almost one year now. When I bought it (an apple refurbished model), I noticed that a lot of keys didn’t register very well, and I ended up replacing the macbook keyboard. That second hand replacement keyboard has served me well for the past 10 months or so, but recently it’s started to fall apart. First it started as a small chip breaking off in the lower right corner of the front face, but a week later, there was a long crack near the chip where I knew the whole thing would break off eventually.

So yes the keyboard still worked, but it looked pretty awful. I’m often at client sites with the laptop and it is slightly embarrassing to turn up with a broken looking laptop. So off to ebay we go, and I bought yet another replacement keyboard. Three keyboards in 12 months is pretty sad. I quite like OSX as a platform, but apple hardware quality is definitely debatable.

Now, the original keyboard on my macbook is what is often called a V3 keyboard (at least that’s what a lot of ebay sellers call it). It has the mute/softer/louder buttons over F10, F11 and F12. A V2 keyboard has the mute/softer/louder over the F3, F4 and F5 keys. There’s a few other differences as well. My 2nd keyboard (the one now with the crack in it) was a V2 keyboard. It was in good condition when I bought it. I probably prefer the layout of the V2 keyboard over the V3, but this time I ended up buying another V3 keyboard on ebay. It was a factory second with some scuff marks on it that you can only see if you angle the keyboard in the light a certain way. My thoughts are that its effectively brand new, so hopefully it will last more than 10 months.