What's happened to Apple?

Steve Jobs and Apple gave us the future. I came from a world of Windows, with a full appreciation of everything that Gates and his enterprise did for us. I ventured into Linus' imagined world, and marveled at what a free and open OS could do. Ubuntu brought it down to a level that mere mortals could use to create and work on amazing things. Then I found macOS, then called OSX, and I thought: damn, this is cool. I managed to get a MacBook Pro, and thought: wow, this is the future.

Fast forward to 2019... My current MBP, as well as my last MBP suffer from crippling hardware failures. The keyboard is either unresponsive, or too responsive. The Genius Bar covers the repairs, but takes my machine away for days or weeks at a time, while trying to convince me to convince my boss to pay an extra fee for some kind of insurance to provide me with a loaner while inconvenienced by known and unresolved issues which play out.

I look to Razer, I look to System 76, I look to myriad hardware focused companies, and they fall short. I return one, or the other, flustered by bad palm detection or perplexingly mismatched quality in components.

Apple teased us with Future Now, and recedes from their delivered promise a bit more each year. No other manufacturer gets close. It's a strange thing.