Few thoughts on this transition.
I was really hoping for a new 12" Macbook with a good keyboard. With the Air going fanless, I don't think this is going to happen, unfortunately. About a year ago I bought one of the few remaining NOS, factory sealed 2017 base 12"ers available from Costco ($800 brand new) and I absolutely loved it, with three exceptions - the keyboard reliability, the bezels (had also just bought 16" so the bezels on the 12" were huge), and ultimately I had to just return it and give up because in normal handling I could feel something loose in the display, shifting side to side. Tried a couple exchanges, same thing on all, brought the last one in to the Apple store to look at during the return window because I really wanted to keep it, they couldn't find anything after opening up the bottom case and were willing to replace the display lid. Figuring it was futile, and hoping for a better product on Apple Si, I returned it and bided time, but it doesn't appear we will get another one. Bummer. Would much rather have that than an iPad.
I bought a 16" MBP last November when they came out, did sort of a unique/balanced configuration right at the $3k mark: i7, 32 GB RAM, 5500M 8 8GB, 512 GB SSD. Classic silver. I was coming from a 15" mid-2010 MBP I never really loved which was an AppleCare replacement for an original unibody late-2008 15" MBP I loved to death. I kept wanting to replace the mid-2010 and get a retina screen, etc., but refused to buy the junk keyboards from 2016-2019 (yes, I'm aware I was trying to buy a 12" MB with one anyway). There was no way I was giving Apple $3k and expecting to get 10 years out of one of those machines. The 16" finally arrived and I was in love, pulled the trigger and it's a flawless machine.
I'm really interested in the coming Apple Si MBPs - don't know if y'all read MacRumors, but all signs point to a redesigned 16.1" and redesigned 14" MBP; the current Si machines are great no doubt, but I'm really curious to see just what Apple can do in an optimized form factor with a second generation chip. Going to be some seriously impressive machines.
My understanding is Apple decided to dump Intel back in 2014 with the Skylake architecture. An Intel engineer was on record saying the biggest complainer of the chips for quality issues by far was Apple, constantly finding problems with the chips. By then Apple had already bought up several Si startups and was well entrenched in making their own phone chips, so it was only natural they'd eventually just do their own chips. Intel continues to fail to deliver anything on time, apparently there's been a lot of ugly political infighting at Intel and the customers are losing.
I think the funniest part has been watching everyone scream about how Apple was going to blow it with Apple Si and it's just like guys, come on - Apple is NOT going to screw this up. Apple is only going to do this if and when they know for an absolute fact they can take a massive, steaming dump on the Intel offerings...and here we are, steaming dump ejected.
That said my 16" is one helluva facebooking machine and will serve me more than well enough for the next 6-8 years. By then I can't wait to see what Apple has available. But kudos to those of you buying Apple Si machines - I may end up caving and picking up a poverty spec MBA as a secondary machine anyway.