Earlier quoted context omitted.
Find a used 2015 mbp. I love mine (15 inch, mid 2015). I probably would have upgraded for a better gpu, but the keyboards are too iffy for me. I shed a lot, and if dust/detritus is the mbp keyboard killer, it will never work for me. Honestly I mostly use my iPad now. Work-work is still a dell laptop with win 10, and is daily torture to use. Mostly from all the corporate spyware my employer loads it down with. At home…
I'm in the same boat as the guy you replied to and yea, I hear people recommend the 2015s all the time. Might do that, eventually. Then my laptop is 4 years old instead of 8 (and I'll probably still have to pay 4 digits for a used one). But what about 5 years from now? At one point, these options fade away. My hope is that Apple is secretly listening. They can't be happy about the negative butterfly keyboard headline…
I'd love to believe this -- I have 5 Apple laptops from the Pismo G3 through a mid-2012, and liked all of them -- and I'd love to go back to being satisfied with that kind of purchase cycle again.
But I don't think Apple got it right before by listening in the sense of gathering feedback, I think they had some internal vision that came from a kind of attention to people like you and I as a market that they cared about.
And I think either the people who had a knack for that vision are gone, or the days when Apple could be bothered to care about that market are gone.