> They literally did all of that in 16 inch.

Well, would be a wonder if they would still be using 2017s i7, wouldn't it? So, accepting natural or following common improvements should be nothing to brag about.

Besides that they obviously still fail with the second point, otherwise this whole issue would not exist.

Original unibody Macbook Pros were 2.5cm (0.98 in) thick.

Retina Macbook Pros were 1.7cm (0.71 in) thick.

Touchbar Macbook Pros, 1.55 cm (0.61 in) thick.

And they "made it thicker". They are now a whopping 1.62cm (0.64 in) thick.

Yes they made it thicker, but as you see, without much gain. They just made it look thicker, with an innuendo that this is for better thermals, while in reality it isn't.

My opinion is that MacBook Pros turned into consumer machines somewhere along the way and the overwhelming majority of buyers use them for Facebook, Youtube and Mail.app. I imagine Apple has a vast amount of metrics on this. None of these use cases require better thermals, so Apple engineers the devices accordingly.

I don't recall my 17" Powerbook G4 ever having thermal issues but how many people would buy a ~$5000 base spec MBP today? See Mac Pro.

My guess is the extra thickness is for the non-butterfly keyboard.

The 16" model has far thermals and performance than they 15" model - even while using the exact same CPU.