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But will they actually fix the keyboard this time?
But will they actually be affordable enough?
Of course not. An Apple product means Apple prices. They'll take a reasonable price, double it, and people will still buy it for the same reasons people buy Gucci sliders and Rolex watches.
I bought Omega purely as a fashion accessory.

I bought my Macbook because it's an excellent machine.

Well, it’s meant to be “pro” after all.
Expected price : $6500. Actually possible in Australian Dollars, wouldn't put it past Apple.
The current max price of a MBP is actually $10,899 AUD, though $5,120 of that is the jump from a 512gb SSD to a 4tb SSD.
I meant the entry model. Easily blame it on the dollar or something.
> 3648.59USD for 4TB of flash storage

Hilarious.

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Meh. I’m seriously considering dumping MacOS and MacBooks in general.

I can get a Lenovo X1 Extreme w/ 64GB of memory and a great display. People have Linux working on it. You can work on it yourself.

I’m not sure that Apple maintains as much of a lead over their competition as they think they do. They’ve made some serious missteps recently.

I recently got a Surface Laptop 2. It's a well designed device and I like the larger screen and slick feel. I like it better compared to the new MacBook Pro at work. Overall,I have gotten quite fond of the Surface Laptop over the last 3 months.
Can you install Linux or FreeBSD on it?
Haven't tried, but I assume it's possible. I'm running Ubuntu in VMs.
From what I have read, to install Linux / BSD you have to first disable SecureBoot. And even then, many features still don't work. So that makes a Surface a dud for any OS other than Windows.
I've had a 2013 MacBook Air as my main dev machine since new and I just can't bring myself to replace it with a new Mac. Cost wise they are horrendous and those keyboards... ugh. I built a Ryzen PC last year and moved all my dev work to a VM that I SSH into on there. When this trusty laptop finally gives up I'm totally going that X1 route, my friend here has one and they are so nice.
I hope they make the touchbar optional.
Great, let’s have another keyboard and touchbar whine fest. Strange how people care so much about a laptop they’re supposedly never going to buy.
Indeed. I stopped my regular visits to the MacRumors forum due to the endless complaining. Lo and behold, it's here as well. I'm personally quite happy with my 2016 MBP. I'm not discounting the complaints, I also have experienced that the keyboard is the weak spot of the MBP. But I can still be happy using it.
I mean......I am one of those "whiny" people, for a very simple reason - I used to be a MacBook user. I've had both MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, and loved them. And nowadays I no longer have either. Why? Specifically and exclusively because of the keyboard, touch bar, and lack of regular USB ports(in that order). I would buy a new MacBook Pro if it had the features I grew to expect from a functional Apple laptop over more than a decade of using them - but right now they simply don't make a product for me anymore.

I don't think it's whining - HN had huge groups of extremely dedicated apple users, and now these users are turning back on Apple purely because of stupid decisions Apple is making. Is that whining?

Weird that people complain about a product line that was discontinued and replaced with a superficially similar one lacking most of the selling points of the previous model?

If Windows wasn't still an inconsistent and dysfunctional POS, and if Linux desktops hadn't modeled themselves after Microsoft's shitty choices, maybe there would be a viable alternative. But there isn't. Quick Look, multitouch spaces, painless PDF management and annotation, effortless sleep+hibernation, applications maintaining state across reboots, transparent versioning and history synced to a backup disk, ...

Why is Apple the only vendor who seems to understand how a desktop should work in the 21st century?

> and if Linux desktops hadn't modeled themselves after Microsoft's shitty choices

Uh? Like what? I see most desktops modeled after OSX.

> effortless sleep+hibernation

Works perfectly with Elementary OS + Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air.

The rest are application problems, not so hard ones, really. Of course somebody will have to do it.

> multitouch spaces

One day.

Drop the touch bar and give us a touch screen!
I've witheld buying a new MacBook for the last few years.

Dislike the butterfly keyboard (lack of feedback) and touch bar removing the ESC key among others.

Really hope this one is something I'd buy.

I often have the need to have multiple instances of Visual Studio open simultaneously. I’ve been looking to get an Alienware Area 51M with i9 9900K and 32GB RAM. If this MB Pro comes with similar specs I may have a dilemma on my hands.
I don't know how people can stand to lug around a machine like that.
Jumped out of the Mac bandwagon last Christmas. Got me a Lenovo Yoga 730 15" with 8core i7 1TB NVMe SSD and 24GB DDR4 and UHD touch-display. All in at $1000. Apple was great while their products were lightyears ahead of everyone else. Now... not so much.
I’m confused because your post has almost nothing to do with the OP and Apple really never had a hardware advantage in the laptop industry as with their desktop and server offerings. As for labtops, they were never the fastest processors GPUs or RAM, never had the biggest fastest storage, always had huge compromises and we’re always expensive. Apple’s true advantage was the willingness to upset a plurality of its users by removing all but the most “necessary” parallels, slick tight design, high quality materials, and of course a simple non-MS, non-Linux OS. All of these are still Apple specific today. An added bonus, Apple always had the highest resale and they still do.
It does not make much sense to me what you are saying.

- When the first MacBook Air was released, for a long time no other vendor came close to producing anything in that form factor with that build quality and reasonable performance (much better with gen2 though).

- When the MacBook Pro retina was released, there was no other laptop on the market with a screen like that for quite a while.

- MagSafe was a brilliant invention that, together with massively better battery life, gave them a real edge in this market way before all that.

These are just a few examples. I didn't even mention the trackpad yet. Up until the 2015 model, the MacBook Pro was pretty much the gold standard when it comes to a well-balanced package for the mobile professional. Surely some have very specific needs that require a real workstation, but you make it sound like Apple did not play any meaningful role at all, which I think is unfair.

The point is that other vendors caught up while Apple regressed in most areas except for pricing. Their premium used to be justified, but not quite anymore.

Please explain the huge compromises of my 2013 15" rMBP.
Give us back good keyboards and I might buy one.

If I need one. The 2013 is still too good.