As someone living off a steady stream of increasingly ancient Macbooks (the last 5 have been second hand 2011 MBPs), I simply don't give two hoots about recent Mac hardware any more - touchbars, keyboards with the tactile response of a Chinese pocket calculator, no escape key!??!, moronic peripheral ports, soldered on everything, meanwhile I am still attached to the software environment.

What I'd really love is a flexible modern laptop with a chipset drawing on architectural designs from the past decade, and Apple simply don't sell that combination any more.

IMO the 2011 era MBP is the peak of this form factor's design, and any subsequent 'evolution' past it will always be a regression in disguise. I really want this shell with modern guts. The Chromebook Pixel comes close, but that's another walled garden I don't want to buy into.

As much as I'd like to scoff at hackintosh users, a hackintosh laptop might be a viable option for someone like me to finally start breaking the chain.

Windows + WSL is also on my radar, dunno if I could tolerate Windows full time again though.