FYI Apple's Vintage policy and current list of vintage and obsolete products world wide.

I won't argue with Artie's opinion. It is inarguably valid from his point of view and that of many others who are perhaps just on the backside of the standard distribution curve of Mac users.

My viewpoint is from the bleeding edge of that same standard distribution curve and there are a lot more who hold Artie's viewpoint than hold mine. From my bleeding edge viewpoint the Touchbar feature is a significant new feature that like many others is hard to grasp until you have actually used it. Although there was a lot of initial criticism of Apple's choice of the Thunderbolt 3 port and grumbling abut external converters for backward compatibility with older standards, in actual practice it has proven to be no big deal. Now we have to wait for the PC builders to catch up again — but by the time they do Apple will have gone on to the next new I/O port standard.

I think I am hearing you say you want a new computer and, if that is the case, then no amount of backing and filling, upgrading, or enhancing your current Macbook Pro is likely to ever satisfy you. At least it has never satisfied me in my 40+ years of experience in personal computing. (OMG — I wish I hadn't added all those years up, it makes me feel old 👴🏻)

LET ME REITERATE:: I wouldn't buy anything for a Mac until after the WWDC (June 5 - 9, 2017). There are potential announcements/changes that could render even the various volume repair utilities in need of a complete rewrite (in fact many of their standard optimization routines can actually reduce the lifespan of SSDs. There are unlikely to be an huge changes announced for the MacBook Pro as it is the most recently ungraded model line, but it is likely they will be refreshed with kaby lake model processors in the third quarter time frame. Those would offer a bit more speed and longer battery life and just might might be worth waiting for.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein