I have the '17 MBP (because I wanted something smaller, I was traveling a lot and it replaced a 15" 2012 MBP). It's been perfectly usable, though I did have to take Apple up on their keyboard repair service because they did screw that up. The rest of the system has been entirely fine, and since the keyboard repair there have been no issues. As I recall the keyboard issue applied to the 2016-2018 laptops. If my only complaint is, "the 's' key got stuck and they had to replace the whole keyboard for free, which took 24 hours at a local repair site", then I'm not too worried about it. It's annoying, but compared to literally every HP or Dell laptop I've owned, it's a far better situation. Though I hear some people had even worse experiences than my stuck 's' key.
Ultimately I think it's hard to come to a conclusion, since few people stick to a particular brand outside the Apple ecosystem. I think the only other bubble would be Thinkpads. So continuous comparison seems flawed anyway. On the other side, Mac users seem to be weirdly accepting of things not working out, the "you are not using it right" meme holds some truth from my observation.
Personally, I have bad experiences with newer Thinkpads and "QC" on dead pixels (lol, one shop won't sell to me anymore, because I keep finding dead pixels), which is why I was considering an M1 Mac for the first time. Sadly/gladly I found out about the various bricking issues in time. Let's see how Apple is going to handle these in the next months...
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I have the '17 MBP (because I wanted something smaller, I was traveling a lot and it replaced a 15" 2012 MBP). It's been perfectly usable, though I did have to take Apple up on their keyboard repair service because they did screw that up. The rest of the system has been entirely fine, and since the keyboard repair there have been no issues. As I recall the keyboard issue applied to the 2016-2018 laptops. If my only complaint is, "the 's' key got stuck and they had to replace the whole keyboard for free, which took 24 hours at a local repair site", then I'm not too worried about it. It's annoying, but compared to literally every HP or Dell laptop I've owned, it's a far better situation. Though I hear some people had even worse experiences than my stuck 's' key.
Ultimately I think it's hard to come to a conclusion, since few people stick to a particular brand outside the Apple ecosystem. I think the only other bubble would be Thinkpads. So continuous comparison seems flawed anyway. On the other side, Mac users seem to be weirdly accepting of things not working out, the "you are not using it right" meme holds some truth from my observation.
Personally, I have bad experiences with newer Thinkpads and "QC" on dead pixels (lol, one shop won't sell to me anymore, because I keep finding dead pixels), which is why I was considering an M1 Mac for the first time. Sadly/gladly I found out about the various bricking issues in time. Let's see how Apple is going to handle these in the next months...