The 2015 design literally needs no improvement. It's weight is fine, its thickness is fantastic (still allows for fullsize ports), it has a MagSafe, and a great keyboard. I think the only thing I could possibly look for improvement on is a slight shrinking of the bezel. A 15" is just a tad too big to work comfortably on an airplane.

I had a new MBP for my job and could not stand the thing. It was a terrible experience. I ended up having to get an external keyboard because my finger joints were hurting from typing on the keys, the touchbar was utterly useless, the touchpad was too large for it's own good (and constantly failed to do palm rejection) and the lack of Magsafe was terribly inconvenient.

Other laptops now match or better the display, and many have better keyboards, though all laptop keyboards suck compared to mechanical (buckling spring, or cherry mx browns) imho. TBH though, I mostly use a deskop, or my work laptop on a dock. I see no upside and a lot of downside to current Apple hardware though.

Some things are timeless. I know The Steve had the Icon Garden destroyed to be "forward looking" and all but...

(granted, same w/ cars and furniture. except more pedestrian regulations that affect car shape and would prevent a Pininfarina ferrari 250 or a BMW e9 from being built today...)

But here's the thing: that seven year old laptop is getting long in the tooth, and in the increasingly likely scenario where it dies tomorrow, I look at my Linux options. At first there was a solid chance of keeping me on an Apple laptop, even if I'm just holding on to the one I've got. Now? Umm, best ship something that the has a better track record fast, because that cooling fan on the '12 is getting more noisy by the day.

EDIT: you know, it just occurred to me how my wife and I got started on buying Apple kit. Somewhere around 2002-2003, I got tired of dicking with the music players of the era. Worked at Microsoft at the time, and bought into the "Plays for Sure" fiasco, with predictable results (it didn't "play for sure" even back then). Alright, g-ddamnit, get in the car, we're buying iPods. Long story, short, I was so impressed it began our downhill slide into Apple Fanboi-ism.

Now I wonder what will happen if I replace my personal daily driver MBP with a Linux box? 'cuz I'm not doing iOS dev right now and don't have to have a MBP. Just one little change because of dissatisfaction with status quo, and it might go either way.

But then I wonder if my iPhone will still be as desirable. I’ve had to stop upgrading there too, because the screen is getting too big for truly one-handed operation.

I'll take a slightly thicker laptop with a working keyboard. I don't mind them making it slim, but a keyboard has to work. Not taking the risk, especially given how expensive it is to repair macs.

Unfortunately I just can't afford a machine that can be brought down at any moment by a speck of dust or that has a keyboard that makes me think someone went out of their way to make typing more difficult. Don't even make me started on not having physical function keys.

Apple, if you listen, not everybody needs shiny toy. Some people need machines for work and have a different system of values or needs that make it more important that the machine is reliable and ergonomic than having nice looks or being 1mm slimmer.

Add a motherboard update to new CPU and make it expandable to 32GB RAM, and they'd fly off the shelves.

At this point, next laptop may well be a linux box... likely going the same when I replace my desktop later in the year.

I have one for work and the keyboard's terrible. Keys will sporadically get stuck or stop working properly. Never had this problem with the old-style keyboards.

Someone should create a laptop which has equivalent aesthetics, high build quality, very high robustness, awesome battery life, an awesome mechanical keyboard, and gaming-laptop like GPU/CPU specs.

I don't care if it's an entire inch thick. Just make the edges super rounded, and I can get it into my backpack just fine! (I'd say to brand it 'THICC' but I'm not sure if that wouldn't draw it towards gaming laptop territory.) The current basic spec 15" Razer Blade is very close to this, but not quite.

Or, at least, when I left OS X, it was just as clunky & crashy & inconsistent as everything else. And I realized that all my tools ran elsewhere or I could find decent alternatives.

I got really tired of limiting myself to the Apple silo. IMO, Apple's only thing was that they were nearly perfect, and that was reason to accept lock-in. Now, not so much.

edit: screenshot for posterity https://i.imgur.com/D1Fyrtv.png

Apple employs quite a few more than 42 people using these keyboards... how are its own employees not going berserk?

> The fact is that many people simply do not contact Apple when their MacBook keyboards fail. They just live with an S key that stutters or a spacebar that intermittently gives double. Or they just start using an external keyboard. Apple never sees these cases, so it never counts in their statistics.

That probably wouldn't be the case for Apple's own employees.

    Is Apple going to accept that they’re currently 
    alienating and undermining decades of goodwill 
    by shipping broken computers in mass quantities?

One at a time, you could end up with one machine with each of the failure modes for that manufacturer, or none at all. But with a batch you could get the same problem over and over.

Long ago we ordered 10 ThinkPads for a project. Two summers later a hard drive failed. Then another. And another. By end of summer, about 7 people had needed to rebuild their machines for the exact same reason: bad hard drives. On the plus side, we were exceptionally good at rebuilding by the 4th one. So when mine was #6 I hardly flinched. But I still lost a day (encrypted drives make everything take a lot longer).

Frankly, buy a Razer (Blade or Stealth, either one). They're the new top of the line IMO, and have been for years.

Razer got me tempted with that one.

will write up on my blog properly after 6 - 12 months daily use

This is not to dismiss any of the breakage that is happening, but to say that it is still possible to have an enjoyable development experience on this machine.

That said, I would love to see the real data about quality and customer satisfaction with this design. And given the changes in repairability, it would be important to understand how maintenance and repair cost to the consumer has changed. I suspect that this data could be used to lobby changes in Apple's warranty practices (both for keyboards and broader issues).

I had my 2015 repaired recently for $400 because I'm waiting for the 2019 macbook and hoping they've gone with a different keyboard design.

Over time, I amassed a full collection of Apple products: iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Apple TV. They worked together seamlessly, and in their first iterations, offered something that had little if any competition.

For the MacBook, which has always been computationally weak for the price, the big win for me was the hardware. OSX/MacOS are nice and all, but I've always been a browser-and-terminal developer, so having Unix under the covers is a minor perk; I can just SSH into a Linux machine to do any serious work. What I wanted from the laptop was a good user interface. The MacBook was sturdy, elegant, fairly light, had a great touchpad, great battery life, great display, and while I was never a big fan of the keyboard, it was perfectly fine in earlier models.

The new MacBook keyboard is completely defective. Brand new, it has a poor feel to it, keys stick, the TouchBar is unwanted and buggy. I've worked with at least a dozen of the new models, and they're all like that. I had one completely replaced by Apple, and it died within days.

The problem for Apple is that now I've bought a ThinkPad. I needed a reliable machine, Apple didn't offer one, so I researched and bought something else. Now, after blindly wandering the Apple forest for a decade, I've realized that the rest of the world has not only caught up, but surpassed Apple, across the board.

I'm not going back. I'm probably never going back. Now I have a Google Pixel phone, which is way better than the iPhone. I'll likely get a ChomeOS-based tablet when my iPad finally dies.

Without the MacBook to tie everything together, and with the realization that for years I've been paying twice as much for hardware as I should, and that the competition has more than caught up to Apple's early innovations, they've lost a customer across the board.

I'm not skipping just this bad batch of MacBooks, I'm ditching Apple entirely. And I'm not the only one.

Most people will keep buying Apple computers because they've accepted the Apple "lifestyle" (ecosystem) and think Windows or Linux are gross. Having a poor product doesn't hurt your sales if your buyers perceive the other options are worse.

I think periodically giving the other side a fair look can only be good though, if just to see what Apple could do better compared to other vendors. I say this as a general fan of Apple's hardware (holding on to my 2013 MacBook though...)

I've been a user of linux from roughly 2005? A user of Windows since 2001 and a Mac user since 2013.

- I sigh deeply, deeply when I am not on my 2012 MBPr macbook.

- I have zero problems with my macbook.

- I am much more productive when I am on my macbook.

I am not going back to a daily driver of either Windows or Linux.

My next stop will probably a hackintosh and that's because of Apple's shenanigans with the newer models.

Admittedly I haven't tried Linux on Mac but XPS specs were just as good so I didn't see the point.

I know they haven't because the things they complain about only apply to Windows XP ("you have to reinstall it every year!") or Linux from 15 years ago ("sound and wireless networking don't work lol").

Don't think I'll ever use the new keyboards. Terrible to type on.

In my experience there are about three failure modes, some of which you can fix by yourself. However, since the keyboard replacement program started I just stopped trying to fix them myself and instead brought them in, because they give you a free new battery too.

1) The key gets physically stuck up and won't press down. You can fix this sometimes by just smushing down the key and crunching whatever crumb was in there down.

2) The key doesn't respond or needs to be pressed hard to respond. This one is hard to fix, but what I tend to try is to get some 70% isopropyl alcohol and a q-tip. Remove the keycap, and dab repeatedly hard and fast with an alcohol soaked q-tip on the round button dot thing. The idea is to get the alcohol in under the dome, and have it dissolve/pump out whatever was stuck in there. A few q-tips worth of alcohol shouldn't reach the logic board, but don't pour alcohol on there directly. When in doubt blow on it, let it dry out, and try again.

3) The key repeats. This one in my experience is easily fixable with the above alcohol and q-tips method.

I've used these methods on a 2016 13" touch bar (problem 2) and a 2016 15" touch bar (problem 3; put in little effort and gave up and elected to get a free new battery). Both were purchased used for cheap, and the 15" touch bar had previous coffee in the keyboard, as I later found out (a little.), and it surprisingly worked fine for about a year until it became unhappy. I've also had a 12 inch MacBook from 2016 that was just fine, even after eating crumby food while using it on vacation.

Based on these experiences, I don't think the new keyboard design rolled out in 2018 with the silicone membrane solves anything but 1), the least frustrating of the three.

I haven't had a dead keyboard to destructively tear down yet, but from observation it appears that the keyboard is made as a plastic sheet with traces on it, and a little metal dome that pops up and down to make or break contact with the traces. Over the domes, there's another cover sheet that's not completely sealed, because it has cut outs for the key hinges and a little weep hole for air to come out when it's pressed. I think the dirt is going in through these. Perhaps if they move to capacitive sensing, or add a little nub under the metal dome and replace the switch layer with the pressure-sensitive sandwich from the older kinds of keyboards, making it so that the part that sucks dirt in doesn't have to make contact but just pressure, this would be resolved better.

The thing is, when typing I really do enjoy the newer type a lot more since the lower key travel requires much less force to actuate than the older ones. The actuation point is also much more precise due to the metal domes vs the rubber ones in the older ones.