The new hardware is still good, but they're not innovating enough. I have a new Macbook and I really like it. Best device I ever used.

Apple's stock price is being driven by buybacks and cheap liquidity (i.e. borrowing against their foreign cash hoard to pay out dividends). This ultimately has nothing to do with technology.

Everyone I talk to in person loves their new MacBook Pro. They say it's their favorite MacBook ever.

I think the new design/specs were polarizing enough to dissuade many devs (at least in my circle) from even bothering to upgrade.

But those who were polarized in the positive direction probably got it and do love it.

I use a 5yo MBP with 16G RAM; the idea of dropping 4 grand on a laptop that will still be capped at 16G 5 years from now is laughable.

This is the single reason why I am waiting for next update. Which should give us the option of 32GB with LDDR4 (or whatever low power memory they are waiting for). This is possible because laptop speed doesn't really increase as much with each revision anymore.

It is, but most people who'd buy the laptop will be just fine with 16GB for the next 1-2ish years.

People hate it won't buy it. Survivor bias.

How are they dealing with the absence of the 'Esc' key? Is it annoying to have the soft key or hardly noticeable?

I remapped my Caps Lock to Esc. My motor memory is adapting, and Caps Lock is actually closer.

I started as someone very sceptical about the touch bar. I don't like it yet, but I don't hate it now.

Its weird, I never missed the key when I hit it but it always felt strange due to lack of feedback. I ended up binding Capslock to Escape and training myself to use that instead. Now I don't care at all.

As someone how has to lug their MacBook from office to home everyday, i'm really looking forward to upgrading. As for the ports, a good 5k screen will work as a dock for the assortment of USB devices, headphones etc that I currently have to connect one by one each morning.

I played around with one waiting for my flight and was tempted to get one then and there as I heard my friends praise it and it felt nicer than my 2014 MBP.

I moved onto a Surface after a few years of being on Macs. While there are some minor, yet key, areas that the Surface, and Windows, are behind in (touchpad, power consumption), I think that the gap between them is closing very quickly. Windows has Ubuntu built into it. The kernel goes through a Windows subsystem, so there is a thin layer of syscall translation involved, but it's more or less complete and is highly usable. I use it daily, and between native sshd and PuTTY, I have a "real" terminal that closely resembles the setup I had going on my Macs. Being able to use the screen as a notebook or tablet is HIGHLY convenient for my meetings and research materials. The Touch Bar is convenient, but very lacking in this regard, and the macOS team is very steadfast in avoiding the development of something similar (that we know of).

Before I bought my MacBook in December I spent a week trying to decide between a Surface Pro and the MacBook. I thought the Surface would be a better fit for what I needed, but I have years of time spent on a OSX (maxOS) workflow for writing books and writing Java, Ruby, Haskell, etc. code for consulting customers. I was concerned that it might take months to get re-settled on Windows 10 + Ubuntu subsystem.

Apple's stock price remains constant because they are artificially inflating their own stock through increased dividends (more than 10bn per year) and stock buyback (increased to 175bn for this next year). They do this so the major shareholders don't lose their value (or, I'm guess this is so).

Apple is dropping faster than excrement in the bowl.

Apple's yield is a little over 2%. That's not a high dividend rate. While it's true that a lack of dividends in a mature company can cause some shareholder dissatisfaction, dividends tend to not pay for themselves in increased market capitalization.

There are companies that use large (10% or more) dividend yields to inflate their share price, which lets them dilute their stock at better valuations. Small shipping companies do this. It's a strategy that's long ceased to be possible by the time a company's valued at a billion USD, let alone over half a trillion.