I use a company-issued MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018), and the so called butterfly keyboard is a serious problem. Same for my colleagues - lots of keyboard issues and replacement.

It was replaced recently and it again shown the signs of keys jamming.
And this is for a computer which mostly sits connected to an external keyboard, so its keyboard was not worn out by daily use that much.

This repair, if it were not under guarantee, would be super expensive as the whole top panel with battery has to be replaced as well.

This kind of keyboard was fitted for several years, and only recently Apple went back to a more reliable keyboard design.

I have a MacBook Air of the same age (2012) and have never had any problem updating it. It's on Catalina now and runs more happily with it than my much newer iMac.

They might not able to upgrade to Catalina that hardware is too old. I speak as someone with an old 2011 Air which is maxed at High Sierra so it may depends on what model in 2012 it was. You can download some non-Apple packages to upgrade non-standard hardware admittedly but that's not a route I wanna follow myself.

That said our Air still runs fine for bog standard browsing and so on the missus still uses it all the time.


I now have a 2019 Macbook Pro which I use for mostly music production and it's great BUT the ARM-based Macbook Pros are just around the corner so it's debatable whether you want to commit to an Intel MBP now that depends what software you want to run and whether you need to wait for ARM stuff to be developed more fully.