I updated from 2012 to 2016, hated and sold it after a couple of keyboard fails, and bought a 2015. My next Macbook will probably be a Thinkpad way things are going.
The better speakers I'd like. I still need to use USB sticks and SD pretty frequently and have always hated bags of adaptors. They always seem to break or get lost at the moment you're sitting with the important client.
The rest seems to come with a cost far worse than the benefit (for me anyway).
Larger trackpad was so large I would constantly get false activations when typing. Perhaps I have the wrong sort of fingers.
The touchbar was constantly activating when I typed on the top row of physical keys. Perhaps I have the wrong sort of fingers again. :)
The newer thinner keyboard was both horrible and horribly unreliable. Dust sensitive? LOL I think back to when the kids were little and throwing rusks, or putting toast in the VCR the moment we blinked. Then the amount of dog and cat hair (that magically gets everywhere) that's been removed from our keyboards over the years.
Lighter is OK, but not at a huge battery life cost compared to the 2015.
Well, don't get the Thinkpad for better speakers. Speaking as an owner of a new t480s, whose dumb idea was to put speakers on the bottom of the case? My lap don't have ears. Of course the battery life is even worse than the bad 2016 Macbook, not by much though. But it's not whatever double digit hours they claim. If you think apple makes nonsensical design decisions, try any windows laptop, apple is still miles ahead in certain areas. Windows is so bad it's not even funny anymore (for example cortana guided setup is disturbing) and don't get me started about linux.
If by holding your hand you mean stuff works out of the box, then yes it isn't great. I did manage to get hidpi working in just 1-2 days (not with wayland, nothing works on wayland, let's give it just 5 more years and I'm sure it will happen), and it also goes to sleep fine, trackpad is not as bad as I expected it to be. All perfectly great achievements for 2018.
xubuntu versions running perfectly on my Thinkpad E550 (and Desktop) for many years already.
Raspbian on my PI's and ubuntu on my beaglebone black.
Don't settle for the provided software configuration. Settle for the open tool that is made for support.
How many rooms in a house do people really watch movies in? A couple of bluetooth speakers covers the 95% case, and just using the crappy laptop speakers or use earbuds or headphones for the 5% case.
Of course it would be nicer if the laptop had better speakers in it, but there are always trade-offs to be made on cost vs benefit, and fairly cheap bluetooth speakers are a pretty good workaround for a lot of people.
Not sure why you call the macbooks speakers crappy, i would imagine most people would consider them good enough and be happy with then instead of dealing with external Bluetooth speakers and carrying them around with the laptop.
My comment wasn't meant to be macbook specific. Most laptop speakers don't sound as nice as a reasonable set of bluetooth speakers or headphones. The main point of my comment was to counter the (strawman) idea that the only option for someone who didn't like the laptop speaker was to carry around a bluetooth speaker with them from room to room, which is of course not very practical. But having a couple of them strategically placed in the house is affordable and practical for most cases.
Now instead of a room think about a house or a office, is your idea of carrying a speaker everywhere still practical or do you think adding a speakers on laptop is more practical?
I think you've misread/misunderstood my comment. I'm trying to say that carrying around a bluetooth speaker IS impractical (and the initial criticism of it a type of strawman argument because it's obviously impractical). I'm not suggesting in any way that carrying around a speaker everywhere is a good idea (it's not).
What I'm trying to say is that if really good audio quality is important to you, then having a couple of sets of bluetooth speakers in your house strategically placed in the places where you'd regularly watch movies or consume other high-quality audio is a reasonable workaround for a lot of people. OF COURSE having better speakers (equivalent in sound quality to the bluetooth workaround) in your laptop would be better if you care a lot about audio quality. But that would add to the cost of the laptop for every user, even the ones that don't care about having really high-quality audio on their laptop. I'm saying that it's not unreasonable for a manufacturer to make some tradeoffs like that when there are workarounds that work fairly well.
Over time the costs of adding higher-end features like this drop, and things like audio quality improve to the point that the workarounds aren't needed (the audio quality of my phone speaker is actually pretty amazing).
By a strange coincidence I'm also in the group of people using their Macbook Pro while sitting on the sofa, due to not having a tv. I wouldn't use a dedicated TV enough to justify having one.
The better speakers I'd like. I still need to use USB sticks and SD pretty frequently and have always hated bags of adaptors. They always seem to break or get lost at the moment you're sitting with the important client.
The rest seems to come with a cost far worse than the benefit (for me anyway).
Larger trackpad was so large I would constantly get false activations when typing. Perhaps I have the wrong sort of fingers.
The touchbar was constantly activating when I typed on the top row of physical keys. Perhaps I have the wrong sort of fingers again. :)
The newer thinner keyboard was both horrible and horribly unreliable. Dust sensitive? LOL I think back to when the kids were little and throwing rusks, or putting toast in the VCR the moment we blinked. Then the amount of dog and cat hair (that magically gets everywhere) that's been removed from our keyboards over the years.
Lighter is OK, but not at a huge battery life cost compared to the 2015.