We went out to Arrowhead Mall yesterday because Ben needed new shirts for work and JC Penney was having a huge sale. He also wanted to go to the Apple Store to look at MacBooks; he has become increasingly disenchanted with his decision to leave the Church of Jobs earlier this year and wanted to check out the new models.
While Arrowhead has had an Apple Store forever, they have remodeled and now have one of the new designs:
That's right. The new stores are like stepping into one of the "artificial constructs" of the Matrix. I even had to look to find the iconic Apple logo outside the store.
Anyway, the model Ben wants is the 15-inch 2.9/16/512 Touchbar, that even with his education discount comes in at $2500—twice what he paid for his Lenovo Yoga with similar specs a few months ago—so it's not happening any time soon.
Even then I'm in no hurry for him to switch back. While Ben loves technology, Ben is also one of those Technology Cursed. He has issues with pretty much every piece of gear he buys, and with my own ongoing problem with the keyboard (yes, it's happening—albeit with different, random keys this time—on the replacement machine I got) on my new Mac, I don't want him jumping into that shark pool until Apple fixes this mess. (If I could do it over, I would go back and get the 2015 pre-butterfly key model because this is really starting to piss me off. There's no logic to it; like with the first one I had, the h-key went wonky. Then it cleared up and the g-key lost its mind. Now it's the n-key. Hardware? Software? Sun spots? Apple will repair it, but from what I understand it will have to be sent out because the entire fucking top case needs to be replaced and I'll be without a machine for a week—and there's no guarantee the problem won't recur. I'm not yet to the point where I'm ready to go without but if it gets any worse I may reconsider that stance.)