My 2016 15" is HORRIBLE for battery drain while asleep. I'm parked on these forums trying to glean info from everyone on the improvements.
That's why I
never buy 1st gen products from any company including apple. It's a hard lesson I've learned over the years of owning 1st gen products and having personally experienced the pains of being an early adapter. 1st gen products will always have some sort of glaring issues and this includes even the iphone x.
When 12" macbook came out in 2015, it looked very attractive but I knew it would have some sort of issues that aren't so obvious and lo and behold, many owners had complained about the battery degradation issues and even though they've improved on the battery chemistry over the last 2 years I have yet to see the batteries hold up as well as mbp batteries do. Hell I've seen a guy w/ 2200 charges w/ 90% battery capacity on his 2013 mbp over at reddit, let alone 2015 marks the year when the new keyboard was introduced. We all know how the keyboard story turned out.
It goes w/o saying that all technologies take many years to reach maturity. I wager the new keyboard designs by apple is the first of its kind and b/c of it, it's bound to have issues. A few things that professors taught me while I was in my engineering school many years ago were 1. the simpler the better 2. nothing works the first time, I mean absolutely nothing. When I see movies where people power up their brilliant machines that look incredibly complicated and took them years or rather in some cases 3 months to put them together and when they magically work and they go, "Yes!", I just laugh.
I'm sure apple put some of the smartest designers and engineers on the team to design these things for the goal of making the 'next gen' keyboards and took them easily years to come up w/ it but at the end of the day, everything boiled down to 'not enough' rigorous testing. Logitech's romer-g keyboards took them 2.5 - 3 years to design if my memory serves me correctly. Their high-end gaming models (like G910) are tested for 70 million keystrokes. I really doubt if apple's done any kind of rigorous, real-life testing to these keyboards before shipping.
Mbps always have had its share of issues during its 1st gen - this includes 2008, 2012 and 2016. My current 2012 rmbp which I am typing on when it first came out had also its share of problems including dead pixels and choppy ui animations. It took a couple of years for them to iron out the laggy ui animations in rmbps but my 6-year old mbp still has laggy ui animations even to this day. It does not bother me too much but I can totally understand why it can bother some people.
When 2016 mbp came out, I was blown away by its space grey colour and the touch id and its new looks, but I held on to my trusty 2012 mbp. I had given some very serious thoughts of buying one when it first came out but eventually I decided not to. I decided to wait. Fast forward 2 years to 2018, I'm still waiting. I don't think it's a worthy upgrade from my 2012 mbp considering all the throttling issues going around and we don't know how reliable the new keyboard is. Yes it is better, but how much better? We don't know. I doubt it will be as good as the prior 2015 keyboards. I have yet to hear anyone complaining about failed keyboards on these prior 2015 models due to crumbs or dusts getting inside. I can bang on my 2012 keyboards all day, all night, all year and I am very confident that they won't fail me.
I agree w/ someone who said we need to see at least another revision to the 3rd gen keyboard to completely fix it. Personally I'm doubtful. This 3rd gen keyboard seems to me is more of an intermittent fix before we transition into the virtual smart keyboards that they've been working on. Perhaps maybe we will see another minor revision akin to from 1st to 2nd gen but I'm not expecting any groundbreaking changes either.
Even 2018 mbp is kinda a 1st gen product in the sense that it's the first gen that has 6 cores that use similar 14nm process node from last year. Even though 'improvements' as they call it have been made, it's still 14nm. 2019 mbps should definitely improve on the thermal and the battery performances if they move to lpddr4 and 10nm which in theory should appease the vast majority of the complaints. But I also know that if those issues are taken care of, then people will complain about something else like design is getting old, it's got the same old thick black bezels, no 4k display, no touch display, no face id, no oled, no 120hz, it's still super expensive, etc etc.
I'm expecting a redesign for mbp in 2020 and specs wise, it's looking very good. But as it will be a first gen product, I'm gonna pass. I will wait and see what others are gonna say.