(tense music)
(dramatic music)
- My name is Matt Powell.
I'm 29 and I'm a loud typer.
I'll be working and then, out of the blue,
some random coworker will ping me
this GIF of a cat just
pounding away at a keyboard
or another cat just playing the piano
and I'm like, I get it.
- There are times where I don't
know if it's hailing outside
or it's Matt typing.
- Yes, it's a sad tale,
but lucky for Matt, tech
companies are silencing the keys.
(upbeat music)
Apple's new 16 inch MacBook Pro
has a quiet scissor-mechanism keyboard
which aims to right all the
wrongs of its horrible loud,
and honestly just horrible
Butterfly keyboard.
While Google's newest Chromebook,
the Pixelbook Go, has hush keys.
I am going to go test these new keyboards
and see if they are actually quieter.
- Oh my gosh, and then
you could give one to me?
- No.
To discover the quietest keyboard,
there was only one place to test.
One of the quietest
rooms in New York City,
an anechoic chamber at the Cooper Union.
Basically, a soundproof dungeon.
This is Doctor Martin Lawless,
a professor of mechanical
engineering at the school.
He jointly oversees the chamber.
- What you hear in this room
is the direct sound from
whatever objects you would hear.
You wouldn't hear any
reflections from the walls
or the ceilings, or the floor.
You're only going to hear the sound
directly from the object itself.
- [Joanna] So with
Professor Lawless' help,
I set up a lab inside with a decibel meter
to monitor the levels coming from the keys
of six different laptops.
Three Macs, two Windows
PC's and a Chromebook.
I typed the same passage on all of them
in 10 second bursts.
To get the loudest pound of reference,
I started with a good
old fashioned typewriter.
- [Martin] Two, one.
(loud typing)
- [Joanna] Which registered
at a whopping 60.2 decibels.
- [Martin] That's loud for a typewriter.
- [Joanna] This is
gonna be the MacBook Air
with the Butterfly keyboard.
(typing)
Apple's MacBook Air,
which has that awful Butterfly keyboard,
was the loudest of the
laptop keyboards I tested,
at 41.9 decibels.
This is the Surface Laptop 3.
(typing)
The Dell XPS 13.
(typing)
This is the new MacBook Pro.
(typing)
After multiple tests, the new MacBook Pro,
with the improved Scissor keyboard,
came in at 30.3 decibels.
This is the PixelBook Go.
(typing)
The PixelBook Go with those
hush keys, 30.1 decibels.
While those numbers showed
very little difference
between the two,
the PixelBook Go felt quieter
in my non-dungeon testing.
Here's those final results.
(upbeat music)
Despite the lab, this
testing wasn't scientific.
For that, we would have
needed a typing robot,
pressing keys at the
same force every time.
Of course, if you buy
one of these laptops,
you may miss all of this.
(loud typing)
Or you may just decide to forget it all
and get one of these.
- She got me a typewriter.
(typewriter dings)
(loud typing)
