Needed a bit more than 120 characters for this.
Rationale
If my 2013 MacBook Air wasn’t nearly (or essentially) dead, I would have skipped this cycle. It didn’t have Kaby Lake. It was about $500-$800 more expensive than I would have preferred. But push came to shove, I needed a new laptop, and it was clear the Air was never getting another update (and I really, really wanted a retina screen after all these iterations).
I didn’t need the 15" model, and it was clear the 13" w/ TouchBar was a bad choice with the battery and processor combination. So I went with 13" sans TouchBar. Below are some thoughts.
Screen
God now I’m spoiled. I cannot wait until there is (hopefully) a MacPro update so I can get a desktop with a retina screen. The screen is really good, and puts every single non-iOS device I have to shame. I’m ruined now.
It’s particularly striking during image editing. The pictures I took up in Tahoe, I proofed them the laptop before doing the editing on the desktop. It was shocking the difference, and I almost gave up twice but the desktop has the gigabit wired ethernet and the pictures are on a NAS, so it has to be this way. I hope that Apple doesn’t disappoint everyone by killing off the MacPro in 2017
Keyboard
Not great initially, but I’ve gotten used to it. It’s not quite as loud as people might mention, but it is louder than the previous iteration. At my normal typing speed (especially my password typing speed) my brain is convinced that I typed it out of order when more often than not, it really was right on the first try. It will remain a laptop keyboard though – I’ll stick with the older, bigger brothers for my desktop typing experience.
Trackpad
Love the size, no issues with palm rejection, but really don’t care for the non-mechanical, haptic feedback emulation of a click. My click success rate is no longer essentially 100% and that’s just frustrating.
Ports
This one aspect just plain sucks. I’ve been bitten multiple times by no SD card reader and no display port. I ended up getting a USB-C SD card reader, but I can’t justify $40 for a display port adapter. I imagine/hope this will be better in about a years time but it sucks now.
I think I would forgive them is this years iPhone had USB-C, but I think that would be foolish thing to hope for.
Battery Life
Given that my Air’s battery was on it’s last legs and couldn’t even go 30 minutes without being plugged in, not to mention waking from sleep/hibernation often took 2 minutes, this is still a marked improvement in my day to day experience. I imagine most people complaining about battery life are using the 15" with the discrete graphics. I can imagine that model that essentially had the same processor TDP, but less battery and no option for non-discrete graphics.
tl;dr
In summary, I’m happy with it and I’m glad I didn’t get the TouchBar version. I’ll be even more happy with a MacPro revision and an iPhone that uses USB-C…
I just hope I’m not delusional on both of those fronts.