But is this really a common occurrence?
Well, I didn't necessarily mean that I was living in fear of specifically the graphics card or the wireless chipset dying on me. I just threw those out there because those two events have happened to me before in previous Macs around the 3 year mark. My 2012 MBP's wireless card died in year 3 and when I had a cheese grater Mac Pro, the graphics card died in year 3.
In both cases for me, the failure happened after AC would have expired anyway so there wasn't any kicking myself for not getting it, but it sure made me aware that those things happen. I'm a heavy user so the chances of something happening are a bit higher.
The thing is that the current MBP models are still pretty new. They've only been out slightly more than 1.5 years so aside from the keyboard being potentially failure prone for some people, we just don't know for sure if there are other possible quirks. It seems like the keyboard is the big one. If that's the only serious flaw of the tbMBP, I could live without AC the next time around. You can always link up or plug in an external keyboard, but for other failures you have no recourse.
Certainly as I bought the first batch of 2016's, I was flying in the dark as to what I could expect several years out so I got AC to have some peace of mind. You can often get AC at a good discount from B&H and other retailers. I think I got mine for $100 off so it was worth it to me.
Anyway regarding the keyboard, I've had stuck and non-responsive keys three separate times. They all resolved with use... like it needed some breaking in and my keyboard started working better after one year than it did in its first 12 months. If your new MBP's keyboard is still working fine after one year, I don't think you need to be paranoid. That's no way to own a computer anyway. It's a tool, not a piece of jewelry.
So congratulations! You bought a great laptop. It's such a great machine that I still call it easily the best laptop I've ever owned even though there are a number of things that I don't like about it. One of the things I wasn't expecting to like was the sound. Wow! They did some magic fine tuning the audio. I really have no idea how they managed to get such an unforgiving enclosure to play music that sounds this good!
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The keyboard issues seems much more common and I don’t want the hassle of dealing with it, covered or not. Also Coffee Lake chip will be a nice upgrade. Hurry up Apple!
I don't think the performance improvements are going to be anything dramatic from this point on. The speed difference between my mid-2102 and my 2016 tbMBP doesn't feel night and day in all things. There are some things that the 2016 totally smokes the 2012 at, but a surprising number of things that it's only a nice bump in performance in.
The only reason I moved on from my 2012 was because I really wanted a 5K monitor.
