I would also be in the market for a new Macbook Pro, but their touch bar is dissuading me... The other thing I'm waiting for is 32 GB of RAM.
I guess I'll keep using my 15" MBP (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) for now... If it breaks before they fix their MBP lineup, I'll see if I can buy a 2015 version ( https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever ). Or I'll look at Thinkpads.
I have been using exclusivly Apple computers for about 25 years. I have been an iOS developer for about 8 of those. The Mac Pro debacle is a whole different rant, but there were three factors related to their new laptops (many other complaints related to developer support, tooling, and so on. again, different rant) that made me decide to stop purchasing my computers from Apple and transition away from iOS development.
First, they introduced the touchbar, which is a feature that is clearly not designed for me (programmer, vim, etc.). In fact it isn't just useless for me; it interferes with the way I work.
Second, using the touchbar as justification, they raised the price to nearly $3000 if you want a 15" screen and a 500G hard drive. Upgrading every 3 or 4 years becomes incredibly expensive.
And third, they deliberately crippled the non-touchbar version of the macbook and will not let you spec it high enough to be competitive with the touchbar versions. You can't even get it with a dedicated graphics card. If the touchbar is so compelling then it should be a feature people choose. Intentionally crippling the machine to force people into an upsell is just maddening. Especially when I'm a developer that contributes to their ecosystem and what they're trying to upsell is completely irrelevant to me.
Not only am I no longer in their target market; they won't even accommodate my needs.
Pretty much same boat. I'm still on a pre-touchbar MB Pro, and it's hard to imagine any circumstances under which I'd buy another Apple machine (maybe if I needed to do native iOS work for some reason). I've held off buying another MB largely because switching habits/software to another OS always seems like something I'd like to shelve. I've managed to keep my current ageing machine viable by offloading increasing amounts of work to AWS, Linode, Raspberry Pis, etc. But this won't go on for ever, and Apple's current laptop line is completely irrelevant to me.
I read you, and I'd think what you describe is a very common scenario among serious devs. I don't understand Apple's thoughts process at all here.
How Apple has destroyed their high end product (at least as far as devs is concerned) is baffling to me, as the rest of the design is exquisite - at least if you could get use to the short key travel. The 4:3 display is especially a highlight, and so is the unibody with that titanium colour.
I develop on a new, non-touch MBP. Even though it's a basic model, I struggled to believe the price of the unit when compared to a high end Dell XPS 15 or X1 Carbon. I would have preferred the (much) faster touchbar model, as I just use it with an external keyboard/mouse anyway.
(I'll give Apple bonus points for forcing me to boot into OSX before rebooting with Bootcamp to Windows 10 to get CPU virtualisation / Docker enabled.)
I'm getting near two years past refresh date on my work laptop. The touchpad is getting pretty funny, but I've not upgraded because of the bar and the approximately one acre that the new touchpad takes up, like they want me to hit it mistakenly while typing...
