I was commenting more on the actual quality issues they've been having, and their replacing some components with ones of perceived lesser quality in the pursuit of size and weight reduction (e.g. the keyboard).
The quality argument isn't worth discussing much, as I assume you agree with the premise that quality should not drop, even if you may or may not agree it has or has not dropped (but Apple doesn't score nearly as well as it used to with review sites, and there are various things I could link to regarding quality problems, or you could just watch from stuff from Louis Rossmann).
The keyboard argument I think requires a bit more explanation, in that I think the keyboard is both of more relative importance than weight, and should be of importance for more time than the weight is as well (you should be using the keyboard longer than you are walking around with the laptop, if it's actually important for your job). As such, I see a change in the keyboard as a functionality loss for a marketing gain, since the actual weight reduction could be very minimal since it was mainly for thickness reduction (it appears the 2015 Macbook Pro might be lighter than the 2019 Macbook Pro?). To me that speaks to Apple trying to retain or cement the status symbol feature of their brand, where artistic design is, to some degree, outweighing functional design.
The quality argument isn't worth discussing much, as I assume you agree with the premise that quality should not drop, even if you may or may not agree it has or has not dropped (but Apple doesn't score nearly as well as it used to with review sites, and there are various things I could link to regarding quality problems, or you could just watch from stuff from Louis Rossmann).
The keyboard argument I think requires a bit more explanation, in that I think the keyboard is both of more relative importance than weight, and should be of importance for more time than the weight is as well (you should be using the keyboard longer than you are walking around with the laptop, if it's actually important for your job). As such, I see a change in the keyboard as a functionality loss for a marketing gain, since the actual weight reduction could be very minimal since it was mainly for thickness reduction (it appears the 2015 Macbook Pro might be lighter than the 2019 Macbook Pro?). To me that speaks to Apple trying to retain or cement the status symbol feature of their brand, where artistic design is, to some degree, outweighing functional design.