MacBook Pro considered a bad buy even at Best Buy's fire sale
by Rob Beschizza from on (#3NQG8)
There's a huge sale on MacBook Pros right now at Best Buy, but Casey Johnston convinced me not to upgrade. The current models' keyboards have severe reliability issues, and are so badly-designed that service and replacement can take hours or days under warranty and cost hundreds of dollars out of it. And on top of that, you're paying a very expensive premium out the door to get a Touch Bar and to not get any useful ports.
I still had my 2013 MacBook Pro around, so I sold my 2016 MacBook Pro back to Apple's refurb program, and now I just use the 2013 as my laptop (I used the recovered money to build a PC, lord help me). This old MacBook Pro is still fine, and most importantly, all the keyboard keys work. The new MacBook Pro is gone. When I started working at The Outline, I was offered a choice of a new MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air for my work computer, and I chose the MacBook Air, with its good keyboard that doesn't break from dust. I'm fully committed to this bit.
I've noticed the growing cult of high-end 2015-ish MacBook Pros with the old keyboards and SD card readers and such. The whole situation has made me want to do something completely different, like give an iPad Pro a try as my main computer. Am I crazy?