I have a 2016 MacBook Pro, and "luckily" the anti-glare coating failed. There is a free repair program for the screen appearing stained, and replacing the display panel replaced the integrated display ribbon cable that had also failed.
I don't think dust is the cause of all the keyboard failures. I had been using it as a desktop computer for over a year. It isn't in a dusty room, and the computer still spends months without being opened. Furthermore, sometimes on waking a key will be stuck in a pressed condition, such that I can't successfully enter a password to log in. Pressing all of the keys doesn't reset the state, but force rebooting does.
If I do use the MacBook Pro's keyboard some of the keys intermittently fail to detect presses, but because there are both problems with keys being stuck engaged, and keys failing to detect presses, I suspect that the switches have some flaw where they can generally degrade due to heat rather than only dust fouling the contacts.
Anyway, I haven't yet had the keyboard replaced, because the failure is still intermittent, and I'd like to get a fresh keyboard right before selling it, sometime after a teardown confirms whether this new model is really likely to be less error prone, or maybe after a more thorough redesign for Ice Lake chips in the 13" model later this year or early next year.
Followup for anyone reading the above with a dark screen/flex cable problem in a 2016 MacBook Pro: today, Apple announced that they will now cover this problem up to four years after the original purchase date.
Not really. It's a cause. But it's also fairly clear given there are key clusters that are more likely to fail that it's heat related sometimes too.
There's probably not a single cause. And indeed, some of the fixes are probably making some of the other issues worse (I would not be at all surprised if the dust membrane is exacerbating the heat issues, and that's why the issues with the MacBook Air are just as bad if not worse than the other machines).
I don't think dust is the cause of all the keyboard failures. I had been using it as a desktop computer for over a year. It isn't in a dusty room, and the computer still spends months without being opened. Furthermore, sometimes on waking a key will be stuck in a pressed condition, such that I can't successfully enter a password to log in. Pressing all of the keys doesn't reset the state, but force rebooting does.
If I do use the MacBook Pro's keyboard some of the keys intermittently fail to detect presses, but because there are both problems with keys being stuck engaged, and keys failing to detect presses, I suspect that the switches have some flaw where they can generally degrade due to heat rather than only dust fouling the contacts.
Anyway, I haven't yet had the keyboard replaced, because the failure is still intermittent, and I'd like to get a fresh keyboard right before selling it, sometime after a teardown confirms whether this new model is really likely to be less error prone, or maybe after a more thorough redesign for Ice Lake chips in the 13" model later this year or early next year.