The real cost to Apple is long-term/permanent loss of customers, and not just MacBook customers. I've never been an Apple zealot. For a while, they simply offer

The real cost to Apple is long-term/permanent loss of customers, and not just MacBook customers. I've never been an Apple zealot. For a while, they simply offered the most functional products. You paid through the nose, but the products worked well out of the box, were sturdy, and offered innovative solutions. Over time, I amassed a full collection of Apple products: iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Apple TV. They worked together seamlessly, and in their first iterations, offered something that had little if any competition. For the MacBook, which has always been computationally weak for the price, the big win for me was the hardware. OSX/MacOS are nice and all, but I've always been a browser-and-terminal developer, so having Unix under the covers is a minor perk; I can just SSH into a Linux machine to do any serious work. What I wanted from the laptop was a good user interface. The MacBook was sturdy, elegant, fairly light, had a great touchpad, great battery life, great display, and while I was never a big fan of the keyboard, it was perfectly fine in earlier models. The new MacBook keyboard is completely defective. Brand new, it has a poor feel to it, keys stick, the TouchBar is unwanted and buggy. I've worked with at least a dozen of the new models, and they're all like that. I had one completely replaced by Apple, and it died within days. The problem for Apple is that now I've bought a ThinkPad. I needed a reliable machine, Apple didn't offer one, so I researched and bought something else. Now, after blindly wandering the Apple forest for a decade, I've realized that the rest of the world has not only caught up, but surpassed Apple, across the board. I'm not going back. I'm probably never going back. Now I have a Google Pixel phone, which is way better than the iPhone. I'll likely get a ChomeOS-based tablet when my iPad finally dies. Without the MacBook to tie everything together, and with the realization that for years I've been paying twice as much for hardware as I should, and that the competition has more than caught up to Apple's early innovations, they've lost a customer across the board. I'm not skipping just this bad batch of MacBooks, I'm ditching Apple entirely. And I'm not the only one.