You have the last good one. My 2015 died and my employer gave me a 2017 that promptly died 3 months later. Apple Care and the genius bar were a pretty shitty customer service experience but I eventually got it back. The keyboard is worse than the rubber domes on the $200 Walmart Black friday special I got several years ago. That's not a joke. For the 2017 model Ram maxed out at 16gb which made it a laughing stock for that era. The touchpad is bigger and still good, but feels substantially worse than the 2015. After a year the battery life was a joke @ <50% brightness. It doesn't feel noticably faster than the 2015 either.

My 2015 was the best laptop I've ever used by a longshot. Thinkpads of the same era match it in build quality and have slightly better keyboards but the touchpad and the Mac workflow are something I grew to love.

The keyboard on the 2017 was so bad when a coworker with an old model was showing me how to do something on my laptop he genuinely thought it was broken.

I have a work provided 2019 13" Mac Book Pro. I was hesitant to let them replace my 2014 MBP because of all the negative press about the new keyboards. FWIW, I now prefer the 2019 keyboard over my personal 2014's MBP, the latter's keyboard now seems mushy and imprecise. So, aside from the touchbar, which I still don't love, I prefer the 2019 MBP over the older model.

That's what I've been saying as well to those who ask. The last good one. Even though it was the staingate one. Typing this on a banged up 2015 13inch. It's seen MacOS, Win for a year and now is on Kubuntu. Battery doesn't hold an hour, but I have yet to overcome the reluctance to pay for something not as good.

It might depend on your typing style. If you hit the keys with force, you might prefer rubber domes/mech keyboards, if you flow around the keyboard just gently tapping the keys, butterfly is amazing. I would easily pay $200 for a desktop keyboard that gives the same typing experience.

I'm fairly heavy handed so maybe that's why it doesn't appeal to me. I use Box Navy switches on one of my mechanical keyboards. Those are notoriously heavy.

Oh man! Kailh Box Navy have actuation force of 85g – 95g. I found 50g mx blues too heavy for my fingers.

Kailh might make something lighter than MX blues. Not sure what's out there on the light side. I'm sure cherry or someone must make something nice that still clicks. I also use linear switches around 60-70g.

Browns are lighter. Low profile Kailhs are even lighter. Right now I am using a scissor switch keyboard and I enjoy it a lot, but I am going to give kailh low profile browns a try. I like the general feeling of mech keyboards, but I don't like blues. I hope browns will be it. If not, scissor switch works well for me too, although my keyboard has issues with polling rate, sometimes when I type fast it swaps keys around.

"you're holding it the wrong way.."

I feel like a broken record but I must push back on the 'quality'. Just in personal experience, we've had macs swell up, keyboards repeatedly fail, expensive repairs.

Maybe the fit-and-finish is high grade but actualy _quality_ is alarmingly low, IMHO, especially for the price.

And if you're on a machine from 5 years ago, maybe you missed the recent plummet.

I'm not looking for what is good, just what's better. Do you have a recommendation for what is better in the PC world?

I think the person you replied to is saying that while the grade of macbooks is good (which normal people call quality), the quality of macbooks is not (ie, does what it says on the tin, and the keyboard lasts the life of the laptop).

It's the BMW argument. Great interior, power, handling. Feels like quality. Actual quality sucks because the thing needs more repairs than a Toyota.

https://www.brainbok.com/guide/pmp/study-notes/quality-vs-gr...

The Lenovo Thinkpad series is well built. The P50 (not sure what replaced it) is really solid, for example.

I have a T480 and it’s the worst laptop I’ve ever owned. Had to send it back once for repairs already. The regular charging port no longer works so I use one of the other USB-C ports, which is now crumbling from the inside. The touchpad moves on its own. And worse, a failed firmware update has corrupted the Intel Management Engine (MeSpiLock failed message every boot) that I refuse to install Windows to fix. Finally, the absurdity of the never-fixed throttling issue on Linux — and Docker if you use Windows — makes it an awful machine for any kind of development. I spent a good chunk of money on this computer and I feel stuck with it. I will stay far away from Thinkpads in the future. Wide berth advised.

Dell XPS 15.

Not even close. All plastic, much worse touchpad and coil whine in all models I cared to check up on.

It's carbon fiber composite and machined aluminum. Yes, there is some plastic, but it's solid as shit.

No coil whine in mine. Touchpad idk, because I don't care that much about miniscule differences in touchpads, but it does the job as well as any high end laptop. All touchpads are trash imo, so I find it hard to prefer one over the other.

Most important for me when writing code is keyboard and screen. The kn is acceptable. The matte screen is a must for me. Even if it was all plastic, tbh I'd still take it for the matte screen.

I think we have different subjective tastes, I use my laptop docked most of the time, but the touchpad on macs is the only acceptable one I've used. All others fall that 5-10% below in performance and smoothness that makes them unusable. It's miniscule, but it's the most important final few percentage points.

Not a huge fan of matte screens either, I like pretty colors that pop and rarely work outside. Although I did have a privacy screen on my computer for a bit which was fun.

Even indoors I find the reflections awful on non matte monitors.

If you have your laptop permadocked, why do you care about touchpad? Surely you use a mouse?

I own one and this is just not true.

Hell no... for reasons not on my part I have one of these. I won't list the problems but I'll just say this: I just want my 2015 Macbook back.

I also own a Precision M3800 (the business version of XPS 15). It is on par performance-wise but not in fit and finish (rubberized wrist-rest? what was Dell thinking?) Granted there are many generations of the XPS 15.

Huawei MateBook X Pro