I probably would have upgraded for a better gpu, but the keyboards are too iffy for me. I shed a lot, and if dust/detritus is the mbp keyboard killer, it will never work for me.
Honestly I mostly use my iPad now. Work-work is still a dell laptop with win 10, and is daily torture to use. Mostly from all the corporate spyware my employer loads it down with.
At home, even for coding, I use the iPad second gen 12.9 and a vps.
My hope is that Apple is secretly listening.
They can't be happy about the negative butterfly keyboard headlines. They can't be completely unaware of "professionals" with a "Pro" model mentioning how they don't care about how flat their MBP is and would rather have better hardware. Any mention of the state of MBPs these days leads to a discussion about how disappointing they are. Every single time they get brought up!
That wasn't always the case, despite all the people making fun of Apple users being brainwashed and whatnot. Up until – yea, basically 2015, Apple users happily chuckled at these discussions as the overall usage of Apple products remained a pleasant experience. But I don't see that anymore. I see desperate clinging to pre-2016 models, a hope that "things will improve" and nervous looks at the alternatives (Win 10, Linux), which don't seem attractive at all.
Basically, if Apple announced a new MBP line tomorrow, 2mm thicker but with a proper keyboard, MagSafe, no-nonsense specs and an option to drop the gimmicks (touchbar) for shaving a few hundred dollars off that insane price (current 15" offers starting at 2.699,00€, here, that's with a 256GB SSD), I bet they'd get overrun with preorders within seconds.
I have hopes because, honestly, I'm out of options and it sucks. So I have to interpret certain things positively. Apple just dropped 3DTouch from the new iPhones, which is an indicator they're willing to let go when shit plain doesn't work out. Jony Ive leaving might be a completely random and unrelated event and I generally respect what he did for keeping things clean and focused – but maybe his departure is a signal to return back to more... "robust" design? Who knows. Whatever the case, Apple needs to get its head out of its ass and acknowledge just how unhappy even die hard fans are with their current MBP line.
I'd love to believe this -- I have 5 Apple laptops from the Pismo G3 through a mid-2012, and liked all of them -- and I'd love to go back to being satisfied with that kind of purchase cycle again.
But I don't think Apple got it right before by listening in the sense of gathering feedback, I think they had some internal vision that came from a kind of attention to people like you and I as a market that they cared about.
And I think either the people who had a knack for that vision are gone, or the days when Apple could be bothered to care about that market are gone.
Plan to use this one for at least another 5 years. It's still plenty fast.
I really really wish they didn't ditch all of the other nice stuff when they ditched magsafe. They got rid of the external battery charge level indicator, the light showing if it's charging, etc. A few times now I've woken up expecting a charged laptop but the cable was loose or not plugged in on the other side (and I missed the sound). It's really awkward to open the lid and wake it up to see how fully charged it is or if it has finished charging. Minor details like those were what I liked about using a Mac.
They do have third-party USB-C cables with LEDs, but since they're passive (just looking at current traveling through the cable) I've heard they're not always correct. I'm curious, but skeptical, of the USB-C cables with the magsafe-like breakoff.
There are used MBPs available from various reputable sources. That's my goto at work, when someone's laptop dies.
1. dGPU that's soldered poorly and whuch thus gets cracks in solder balls after repeated heat cycling because the cooling solution and fan curve is not tuned for performance.
2. Motherboards being poorly supported, which leads to them flexing a little every time the laptop is opened and clised, which leads to components becoming desoldered due to cracks in the solder.
3. On the newer macbooks he says that there are chips that just die randomly, as he's had specimens that were quite new and without a sign of bad handling on the inside and out and yet a chip has gone bad all of a sudden.
That's where I'm stuck. We're all-in at our house on Apple stuff. I'm no Windows hater per se, hell, I used to work at Microsoft and my wife still does. And there was a time that I'd say about Mac OS: "this is what an operating system should be". Oh, you most certainly disagree, but bear with me. I don't say that anymore. Too much half-assed shit, and yada yada, no need to repeat it here; macOS ain't what it used to be. But what else am I going to use? I keep rootin' for Linux, but every time I boot one of my VMs, well, it ain't replacing macOS just yet. Windows (at least the NT variants) when I worked for MSFT was a perfectly servicable operating system. It wasn't Unix, but it was better than classic Mac OS, and pretty damned solid. But I have to use Windows 10 at work now, and I fucking hate it. Again, no need to repeat it all here, I just do.
Yeah, Mac hardware sucks, too. I guess when my 2012 retina dies, I'll have to...oh, wait a minute, I'm still plugging away on a seven year old laptop? That I've dragged all over God's creation and use daily? Still as functional as the day I bought it? I dunno, will I find a better alternative come replacement time? Or has the quality of everything else gone down, too? I know, I know, X1 Carbon, XPS; but then my gut seems to think that I hear just as much complaining about those, too.
So in truth, when the 2012 MBP dies, I have no idea what I'm going to do to replace it.
EDIT: thanks, folks. Don't know why I hadn't considered used 2015. If a 2012 is fine, I ought to be tickled with a 2015, right? :-)
Sidenote: "which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space." Unless you're using Python, I think the author wants to replace "indentation" with "incantation".