I’ve been wanting to get a 2015 MacBook Pro before they switched to the worse keyboards, but now I should maybe just look for an even newer one...?
Post-pandemic, I’m almost exclusively typing on a Kinesis, but pre-pandemic, I found the laptop keyboard to be okay.
If I’d known we’d have a pandemic, wouldn’t be traveling in 2020, and that M1s were coming out, I’d have waited longer, but I’d probably have made other, more impactful decisions than which laptop to buy.
If you can find a much newer one, the more recent 16” macbooks have a much improved typing experience over the first attempt at the butterfly keys, otherwise a 2015 one with upgrades to at least the RAM will still run quite well.
I'd be surprised if they brought back ALL of the ports. I'm guessing they'll bring back the HDMI and the sd card slot (although probably microSD this time).
As such they would need to add a full SD slot for people who use professional cameras because that is the form factor that these cameras use -- not microSD.
Think about it another way -- what kind of products use microSD cards? What market would Apple be targeting if they brought microSD slots to their laptops?
I don't use mine for CPU intensive tasks though, so YMMV.
Wife's Macbook Air needed a new battery end of last year and I thought "eh, $129 is worth it" only to find out that the battery wasn't actually available at any price from Apple. Ended up replacing it with an aftermarket $30 one and it's been great for 3 months, but that's also not a glued-in battery, so it was an easy 10 minute job, certainly not the case on the 2015 MBP.
If your computer is coming up on one of those timelines, the battery is slightly weak, and you want to keep it, might be worth getting the service while it's available. I was not happy to have to go aftermarket, given some of the shadiness in that market.