If you know you're going to buy Applecare, why wait 11 months to do so? The coverage starts from the purchase of the computer, not of Applecare.

My local non-official Apple/PC store recommended postponing paying for it. It makes no difference in the length of coverage but you don't pay Apple for the insurance coverage until the end of the free warranty period.

Amex automagically doubles the warranty period for up to a year, even for their 'generic' cards. $249 to cover years 2 and 3 aren't really worth it (by then you've survived the crib death portion of the bathtub failure curve, and the hardware (that is cycle-for-cycle) has depreciated to the point where I don't bother with AppleCare any more.

What is worth paying a bit extra for is Lenovo's on-site warranty servicing, where their techs will come in to your office within a time interval. It's generally accepted that post-IBM Thinkpads are less "I can take an 18 oz claw hammer to it" than the T40 era tanks[1] but I'm hard enough on my hardware where I managed to bend the corner within 3 months of owning my first-gen MBA 13" by hucking into a TSA container in a morning grog to catch a red eye. (I also have the uncanny ability to kill headphones and fray power cords with ease.)

Hackaday's linkbaity[2] article is somewhat helpful (though a bit late since you seem to have made your purchase already).

As someone already mentioned, with Bash-as-a-first-class-citizen in Windows 10, as well as the general stability of the OS (I've got > 3 months of uptime on my well-abused Inspiron i7 that's coming up on 4 years old and it's as responsive/reliable as Windows 7 was), I have no particular desire to return to running OS X as my daily driver.

[1] www.retropcmania.com/2009/11/ibm-thinkpad-t60-review-thinkpad-t60-vs.html The rigor with which some of the TP aficionados have analyzed their hardware amazes me. [2] hackaday.com/2016/10/28/apple-sucks-now-heres-a-thinkpad-buyers-guide/

How are the modern keyboards?

(I got a Dell Latitude last time and will probably buy another one next year. Good for Linux, lots of ports, ok screen, not so expensive and sturdy. But an ugly plastic box that is not so well designed. The touch pad sucks compared to Apple's, etc. The deciding factor was that I need apt and had problems with the package managers before on MacOS.)

You should go to a Microsoft Store and an Apple Store and try a large variety of laptop keyboards. Someone isn’t going to be able to intuit your preferences via text conversation.

Great advice. Also, stores like BestBuy and Walmart often have a wide range of laptops on display to try.