I've recently bought my first MBP, and I agree with some of the points on here, but not all of them.

The main thing I would agree with is the cursor keys - despite having spent a couple of months with mine, the up/down cursor keys (which I use a lot) aren't good - full size ones would have been better, IMO, but they of course would ruin the look.

2 Thunderbolt ports isn't enough - I think there should be a couple of USB ports. I've not missed the SD card slot, but then I'm not a photographer, but a lot of MBP users are; having to have a dongle all the time for these would be a real pain. With my Cubase dongle and iLok, I can't charge the macbook without a hub, and that's not very good.

The loss of Magsafe is also a bad idea; previously I had a macbook air (I bought it cheap as a test to see if I wanted to go all in on a MBP for my next laptop), which had it, and it saved it a couple of times when the kids weren't careful. So much so that I've bought a USB-C 'magsafe' adapter which I generally leave plugged into the side now.

I find the keyboard to be good, though; I actually got a 20 minute go on a student's new MBP to see if I'd get on with the keyboard as I was sceptical about it; it's much better than I thought it would be, although I don't like the sound - it's quite loud (or maybe I'm heavy-handed). Hopefully the reliability will be better than the OP's.

A lot of the other issues mentioned are things that were generally known as soon as the models were announced, though? Lack of a physical esc key, etc... and indeed some of the things that I'm not so keen on above are things I was aware of before buying; only the cursor keys and keyboard noise weren't. The things mentioned above were all compromises I took when purchasing, but maybe that's the poster's point - that a 'Pro' machine shouldn't have such compromises, particularly when they don't mean anything is sacficed other than a clean look or a mm off the height/200g off the weight?

There are a lot of positives from the MBP though - the build quality is miles ahead of everything else I've ever owned, and the screen is fantastic; I have taken to using the MBP for screenshots for the book (using Cubase) that I've written as nearly every bit of text looks better than it does on Windows. I've not found the battery life to be as bad as mentioned in the article, but I know this is strongly dependent on usage, and I've spent the majority of my time on mine learning Python, but when I've used Cubase it's not been as good, but not as bad as in the article.

I did spend a lot of time looking at what else I could buy for similar money, but I wasn't sure I'd have the longevity from any other brand; most of my PC laptops have lasted about 18 months before hardware failure (this is averaged over the last 15 years) - with only one exception, the last one which managed 4 years. I've bought the MBP as an investment due to being made largely redundant and wanting to spend a couple of years learning new skills to hopefully move towards a career in programming; I didn't want (and couldn't afford) a computer that would die in 18 months' time, and generally Macbooks seem to be long-lived (and have good residuals after 5 years).