I owned a 2012 Retina Macbook Pro bought the month they first came out.  That was my first Mac and the best laptop I ever owned.  It was still working basically perfectly in 2020 when my son started borrowing it from me with ever increasing frequency and I decided to get a new Mac just for myself.  I had refused to upgrade to the prior generation because of the touch bar (with no physical escape key, my biggest gripe by far), the lack of useful ports, the horrible flat keyboard that ended up being very unreliable as well, and the removed magsafe charging port.I thought I would hate the touchbar as a useless extravagance foisted on us by Apple but really I'm ambivalent to it.  The physical escape key on the newest model is enough for me, and makes the touch bar acceptable rather than being a nonstarter.  The lack of useful ports turned out to be only a minor inconvenience as one multi function dongle for $25 got me all the ports I needed and since I don't use ports all that often anyway, is something I can live with.  The keyboard on this model, although not quite as nice as the one on the 2012 - 2015 models, is acceptable.The *only* thing I can truly complain about with this model is the removed magsafe power adapter.  It was such a nice feature of the old laptop - so easy to plug in, effortless in fact, with the way it willingly snapped into place on its own.  With the USB-C charger of the newer model I find myself fumbling to get it plugged in and although it's not a huge deal, it's just a constant reminder of how Apple's hubris has eliminated something that was so nice, and completely unnecessarily.  And it was super nice to just flick the old magsafe connector off when you wanted to move the laptop, all the while feeling confident that no matter what happened, you weren't going to be breaking your expensive new laptop because of a trip over a power cable.In terms of speed, I got the lowest rated CPU and my rough benchmarking shows it to be approximately 2.5x - 3x as fast as the 2012 low end processor.In short - this laptop really is excellent.  The 2012 Retina Macbook Pro was the best laptop I ever owned, hands down, and was in excellent shape after almost 8 years of use due to its extremely durable construction.  I fully expect this new laptop to hold up just as well.  If this laptop had a magsafe power adapter, it would be PERFECT.  As it is, I knock off a full star for Apple's hubris.