There's a recent story from various sources suggesting that
this year's MacBook Pros won't see a major change. I take this to mean the existing case style doesn't change but the internals get a refresh and not that Apple are going to be stupid and just keep selling 2017 models this year and hope people don't notice.
I guess there might be some tweaks done to improve things on a per-machine basis but it's looking a lot like a design flaw or Apple's design hitting manufacturing tolerance issues with mass production that's only cropped up through 'normal' usage - a drawback with limited testing possible due to secrecy:
1. People caning their machine and generating heat which distorts the case just enough to unregister the keys.
2. People eating at their desk or in a dusty environment (eg outdoors) and crumbs/dust get under the keys.
3. People unboxing their brand new Mac and finding some keys don't work from the outset.
These points refer to the keyboard controversy. There's also been a note about the battery life in certain conditions. Internally, the battery on the 2016 MacBook Pros failed a "key test" in the late development phase and rather than using terraced multiple slabs of battery to squeeze out a higher capacity (like the MacBook) Apple instead had to go for a more simplistic shape. There's been no mention of a large internal change from iFixit or similar guys so I guess the assumption here is that altering that would be a major engineering undertaking.
The downside of this is complaints from users who say battery life comparatively sucks when hammering 2016 and later MacBook pros compared to the more modest 2015 model which actually have a larger battery. Apple have tried to bridge the gap with the more power efficient Skylake and then Kaby Lake CPUs which have helped to a certain extent but it appears that the battery is still too small. Again, the controversy over that appears to have largely died down but another driver for Apple to adopt the latest CPUs for the MacBook Pros is the incremental power savings that will increase the battery life.
Apple constantly go for 10 hours battery life on their
own tests (wireless web or iTunes movie playback) which consist mainly of light web browsing and similar duties. Obviously, everyone's mileage will vary and it's obvious here that heavy duty video rendering will reduce battery life accordingly.
Even if Apple had cracked the 'key battery test' they might be waiting for a major upgrade to reintroduce the terraced battery which might then in turn release more space for the keyboard. This bit is pure speculation.
The 2017 fix may or may not involve shims placed under some or more keys to lend more stability. I wouldn't call this a major upgrade - more something an Apple Store can do to fix individual MacBook Pros on demand.
A nominal 2018 model would in theory be the third generation of the current iteration and I don't think we'd see a complete redesign until a 2019 model at the earliest. Note that the 2017 model arrived pretty quickly in early 2017, so the mythical shims would have been in use. Fixing the other issues may have to wait until 2019 when the 4th generation should be due but Apple could justify a change by doing something radical such as the move to a 14" and 16" model which has been written about in here before.
