The arrow keys and touchbar make that machine completely unsuitable for writing code, at least for me. My right hand needs to unconsciously lock on to the arrow keys, and that's just impossible with that layout. There's nothing to grab on to. My new iMac keyboard sits in a drawer collecting dust solely because of the arrow keys. And the butterfly mechanism is unproven and untrustworthy, I don't care how many times th…
There is some claim that they've fixed the keyboard issue. Aside from that, across 2 MacBook Pro's and a MacBook Air, I've had 0 keyboard issues. I don't know if I've just gotten lucky, kept my keyboard clean, or what, but it just has never been a problem for me.
The failure rate of the butterfly keyboard design is clearly orders of magnitude too high and is the sort of thing people should genuinely lose their jobs over (and perhaps they have). But "orders of magnitude too high" might well mean one or two percent, rather than one or two tenths of a percent; outside the company, I don't think we have any reasonable estimates of the failure rate, just anecdotes. My work laptop has no problem, although its lid is usually closed; my home laptop, a MacBook Escape, also has had no keyswitch problems, although I mostly use an iPad for portable work now. Most of my coworkers have new butterfly-switch keyboards and I don't hear of significant issues; I've talked with a couple Mac IT people at different companies and they haven't experienced huge failure rates, either. This is, again, all anecdotal, though; some people will come back and say "I'm in an eight-person group and three of us had bad keyboards."