its perfectly reasonable to buy an older tech if the main interaction with the machine is blatantly poorly designed and expensive to repair. the 2016/17 have a 5-10 percent performance over the 2015. thanks to intel making small incremental improvements since sandybridge all the way up to kabylake. i and apparently many others are willing to compromise that small gain in performance for a much more reliable machine. if apple decide to use intel's new 4 core i5 in their new mbp then yeah it would be worth risking it.
you don't have dedicated gpu on the 13inch, only the 15inch have that and it not the spec you write home about.
and i did return it, i started out with a 2-16 13inch mbp tb, on day 3 the keys start going off the track and returned it, purchased a 2015 with exact same spec, restored it with time machine and boom all my 20+ tabs on chrome and vmware win 10 ran flawlessly.
"You also mentioned the ports. But this is again, incorrect. The usb-c ports are far superior in every way. What are you going to do in a year with useless display port ports? At work when we were issuing 2015 15” pros guess what came standard? A dongle for this useless dumb port."
the lack of ports is a not serious issue here, its certainly an issue for some who likes the convenience of just using a usb-a plug and play instead of using a dongle everytime. apple should've left at least 1-2 usb-a on it, imagine if you purchased a 2008 mbp and all it came with are firewire ports because its a superior port but no one uses them?
"You don’t know the true defect rate. And if the keyboard is going to fail it’s probably going to fail in the first year anyway. "
you don't know the true defect rate either thn, so you can't say it is overblown, so until someone compel a discovery to apple's repair and inventory in a suit we will never know, but the amount of uptick of heated debates on here and countless other places should be sufficient to warrant this is indeed a serious issue and should not be carelessly disregarded by mere individuals who have not suffer this problem yet.
"Ok then you can’t say it isn’t overblown. So now we’re back to just comparing specs. Don’t buy 3+ year old computer hardware when you can buy newer, better hardware. Especially when the old hardware isn’t that much cheaper."
good finally we agree on something, compare spec wise
2015 mbp 13(my model)
2016 mbp 13(my returned model)
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-6267U-vs-Intel-Core-i5-5287U
not bad for old tech right?
"What advice will you give next year or the year after? Don’t buy the 2020 pro get the 2015!"
if apple choose to ignore the complaint and keep offering the 2nd gen butterfly keyboard thn yes i will keep recommend the 2015 or even a windows if osx is not on top of the priority list. there is a reason why the new TB mbp have such mixed reviews and the fact that you bluntly choose to ignore them and recommending users without telling them the other side of the story is very irresponsible.
"Fkn ridiculous."
again i'm not here to question your integrity but merely pointing flaws in argument and to fill out the whole picture so the buyer can make an his/her purchase based on unbiased undiluted decision.
to summarize my opinion on this matter as a whole:
if the 2016 model can be had for not much more then yes i would not throw out recommending a 2016, so long as the buyer is aware the keyboard issues and what it would cost to repair it(700-800 out of warranty) and that they are ok with the feeling of the new keyboard, these are my premise for recommending the 2016 and up.
