And yet, here I am, three keyboards later, with no end in sight given that I couldn't possibly baby mine more than I do without locking it up in an argon-filled clean room.
History won't look at this era of Apple laptops favorably. It really makes one wonder how they missed this one.
It's also an indictment of this era of both hardware and software that nobody else produces a more compelling option.
They were way ahead of other laptop makers in basically every way but upgradeability, so they could afford to screw up like 1/2 of all the things about their laptop (all at once, which is pretty crazy), badly, and still be way ahead on the other 1/2, such that switching isn't an unequivocal win.
Meanwhile, I still have a Dell Latitude 10+ years old that's chugging along on its original battery (now down to about 30 min battery life), an HP consumer convertible laptop (early precursor to the tablet laptop era) that's almost as old and still chugging along. Keyboards on both still work great and have survived pizza, crumbs, and numerous spills--and both still infinitely more comfortable than the punishingly thin keyboards on their Apple counterparts of the time and since. My Surface Pro 3 has survived being dropped multiple times from heights that have killed my coworkers' iWhatevers.
Oh... and the real kicker? Each of these laptops cost several hundred dollars less than comparable Apple laptops with the same or better specs. Pretty much the only category Apple had them beat was in (subjective) appearance.
Well, people keep on buying the darn things even though they know what they're getting into.