New 13-inch MacBook Pro

Only for hardware, and only if you pay extra for it.

Dell's higher tier hardware support is pretty great, but it isn't an apples-to-apples (sorry) comparison.

I'm in a similar position and I can answer for my situation. I bought iPad 3 back in 2012 I think. I liked it a lot and I bought iPhone 4S which I liked even more (until they released iOS 7 but that's theme for another rant). After that I understood that I love Apple approach and decided to buy a Macbook as I wanted to write some apps and also needed new laptop at that time. I bought Retina Macbook Pro 15" mid 2012.

Well, it was worst laptop I ever saw. Software was good, I still love it. SSD broke in the second month, so I took it to repair and it was in repair for another month until replacement SSD arrived. Thankfully it was covered by warranty and that's the only good thing about this situation. I used it for 2 years and then it just started to tear apart.

Charger cable failed. I bought new at aliexpress, tried to replace it and almost caused a fire, so I had to buy a new charger which costs like a cheap laptop LoL.

Keyboard failed. Right now half of keys just do not work, another half of keys work if pressed hard enough. And I did not spill anything there, they just don't register presses. I'm using USB keyboard to work on it.

Audio port failed. There's some switch there to detect optical cable or something like that. That switch is stuck, so red laser always lighting out of there and macOS thinks that I inserted a headphones, so speakers do not work. And headphones do not work either. I'm using USB headphones if I need sound.

It sometimes panics. I think that something's wrong with GPU. It's Nvidia GPU and I've read that it was poorly soldered. Not sure.

Its battery almost dead, it can live for a 10 minutes of low-power usage. Of course I can't replace a battery, because it's glued.

Even on charger it gets hot on load pretty quickly and then it starts to throttle. Its CPU going lower than 1GHz. And system becomes very laggy, everything slow as hell. Its cooling just terrible. Sure, it's a laptop, but I never experienced such a slowdown with other laptops. I was very disappointed with Apple engineering.

I've used few laptops in my life. Not a single one of them caused so many issues. Not a single one of them had faulty charger cable. All of them have easily replaceable battery.

Also in my country I'm paying heavy Apple tax, Apple devices typically cost 30-50% more than in US, but other manufacturers have more sane prices, so I would have to pay much more extra.

I went back to Windows and I'm pretty happy. I never liked Windows, but since Windows 10 it's actually good OS that works much more stable than macOS and have all the software I need.

My last hope was Mac Pro. But its price is just absurd, so that hope is vanished. Basically Apple does not make any computer that I would want to buy, all computers are antithetical to my needs. I want something that's reliable, bulky, powerful and repairable. Preferably a PC, as I don't really need a laptop. And they focus on the opposite properties. So while I loved macOS, there's nothing to run it on.

I'm thinking about hackintosh and probably will build my next computer considering it (can run Windows anywhere, so can select hackinosh-friendly parts anyway). But it seems that hackintosh in the future might be doomed (more proprietary hardware, may be even ARM migration), so probably that won't be a way to go either.

What funny is that I'm in a similar position regarding phones. I hate large screen phones and with discontinuing iPhone SE 1 Apple stopped producing the only phone that I'd want to buy. I'm using iPhone 8 now, but I don't like it and thinking about buying SE 1 instead. Too bad that Androids don't have any phones for me either, so it's more about phone industry rather than just Apple.

Re left ctrl, btw, it’s possible now to map ctrl to esc. It’ll map both keys though—-the apple interface doesn’t do left/right.

It’s a “simple modification” (specific type) in Karabiner though, if you use that. I use PC mechanical keyboards so most of my typing devices a) have swapped around mod keys and b) map right ctrl to fn so I can do Mac device hotkeys from pc keyboard.

As I've written before on HN:

A hub with multiple USB-C downstream ports cannot exist with any sort of reasonable UX. The C port supports multiple "alternate modes," which remap USB-data pins to other functions (like DisplayPort, HDMI, Thunderbolt, analog audio, etc.)

The various alternate modes are not simply transporting display/audio/Thunderbolt data over a USB channel. It's the difference between packet switching and circuit switching.

Plugging in, for example, an HDMI adapter to one downstream port affects what devices can be plugged in to other downstream ports.

A true HDMI adapter would revert all other downstream ports to USB 2.0. But... an HDMI adapter that's really a DisplayPort with internal DP -> HDMI converter can potentially allow USB 3.0 on the other downstream ports (or, potentially, ONE other port with DP and the rest with USB 2.0).

Either way, plugging in the HDMI adapter means your USB-C headphones might stop working (depending on whether they are analog or have an internal DAC).

How are users expected to understand that they need a certain type of USB-C headphones and a certain type of HDMI adapter in order for both to work at the same time?

For me it is still the best OS experience by far.