I ordered a 2020 MBA for home use.
At work, I use a 2016 MBP with Touch Bar. It was the second Apple laptop to get the butterfly keyboard, after the 12” MacBook in 2015. It’s the first Apple product I’ve owned (well, my employer owns it) that I don’t like. For my use cases, the Touch Bar turns out to be a downgrade from the dedicated function keys. But the real problem is the keyboard.
Starting a few months after I got the machine, the keyboard started having intermittent errors. The most annoying of which is that certain keys would randomly trigger touch Bar functions. But also some keys repeated letters.
My employer’s tech support people tried replicating the errors but couldn’t (the errors happen intermittently). So my employer was never willing to replace it or even have Apple replace the keyboard.
Aside from the keyboard errors, I just didn’t like the feel of typing on it. I bought a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard to use with the computer, and that made it tolerable. And quite often, I brought my own laptop to work so I wouldn’t have to use the 2016 MBP with TB.
My own laptop at the time was a 2015 retina MBP, the last MBP with the original scissor mechanism keyboard. I effing loved that keyboard, like I loved the keyboard of the 2012 mba I owned previously.
When the 2018 retina MBA was announced, I ordered it on day 1. I love the MBA form factor and only bought the 2015 rMBP because the Airs at that time still had the low-res display.
My 2018MBA felt a little underpowered, but I could get by with it and it was worth it to finally have a MBA with a Retina display.
The keyboard on my 2018 MBA was quieter and less uncomfortable to type on than my 2016 MBP with TB at work. But after 1 year it developed a problem with repeating keys. So I took it to Apple Store, who replaced the keyboard under the butterfly keyboard repair program. The new keyboard feels a little better to type on, though not as good as the scissor keyboards from 2015 & earlier.
The 2020 MBA is almost the perfect machine for me. Scissor keyboard, Retina display, much faster quad core processor, and the model I ordered has 1tb SSD, all in the wedge form factor that I love and at a price that by Apple standards is a great value. I’m disappointed about the mediocre web cam. But I don’t use it much (I never used it before social distancing, working from home, and having more face time and Skype calls with my friends and family.)
I hope all of you who’ve ordered a 2020 MBA love it as much as I expect to love mine.