I have a 13" macbook pro touchbar (~2500 bucks with warranty!). I've had it for about 4.5-5 weeks or so.
I LOVE my Apple laptops, and have NO problem paying a premium for them. They have been excellent, and every member of my family is outfitted wth an Apple computer. The IT distraction time since I switched everyone has been pretty much NIL.
I took it on a trip that was 16 days, or I would have returned it (14 day return policy). Now I'm thinking about dumping it on eBay.
Here is why:
* The battery life for a developer is terrible. I consistently get between 3-4 hours of battery life when developing, at best. It's probably 2 hours less than my old 2013 Macbook Pro 15.
* The touchbar is not an improvement. I'm constantly hitting back in browsers as my hand is large and brushes against the bar. It has also crashed on me multiple times when watching long videos, which means I can't mute or adjust the volume when someone calls (that's when I find out it's dusted itself). My experience is that it does a lot of accidental stuff because it exposes a lot of functionality that normally requires explicit input as casual input, so zooming around youtube videos and losing your spot, triggering Siri (yes, I turn it off eventually), accidentally muting with a simple touch, etc, are all super easy mistakes to make. I preferred it when my machine's behavior was predictable. The major issue is that thus far there is no upside for this downside — there are no killer features for the bar (even the volume, rather than giving you more granular controls, uses the old sound register stop points rather than moving to a 99% scale as would be obviously intuitive given the interface — just plain dumb design from Apple honestly). Similar to my experiences with Siri, it's not making my life better.
* It's not faster in practical applications, and in fact takes a while to recover compared to my old laptop (a lot of waiting to type on the login screen), though it's not particular noticeable.
* The arrow keys are utterly terrible. For a developer, they are a fail. Why Apple needed to kill those essential buttons (for games, dev, etc) is beyond my comprehension. The keyboard is definitely better, but the arrow key situation is a mess.
* I have to keep my phone plugged in all the time, which means I have a dongle on my laptop pretty much permanently. This is dumb.
* The loss of the magsafe adapter has already caused my laptop to scoot right off the couch twice when animals and kids are around. Why? Why would you kill this and especially go back to a port than can be damaged with basic use? This just violates common sense.
What is better:
* The screen is sweet. I absolutely love it.
* The keyboard is awesome for touch typists.
* The touch pad is really the best I've ever used.
* The dark grey color is attractive.
I've also heard rumors that Apple has merged their macOS team into their main engineering / iOS teams or some such. Not what I wanted to hear, and totally not the direction that would keep me loyal to the company.
Overall, it's worse. And the features that have been added do not redeem the laptop (which is totally what almost every Apple device has done for me — I was stunned). This is the first time it's genuinely a step in the wrong direction. Though I haven't seen any discussion of it, I believe Apple made many of the mistakes it has made with the Apple watch on the Macbook Pro, but that may be because Apple added an Apple Watch to the Macbook Pro. It's solving problems I don't have, and therefore providing me with products that don't possess essential utility and therefore don't meaningfully improve my life or provide me with a "sense of better being," which is what graduated design at it's best can do. This is a big, big mistake, and exactly how Apple lost it's way the first time around.