In my personal experience and recollection, the standouts for most durable and reliable models (other’s experiences may vary, of course) were MBPro 2012 and 2015.
Now that Apple will essentially be marginalizing 2015 I am curious as to which of the more
recent iterations other consider in the above stated category.
In my experience the Touchbar 2017 keyboard disqualifies that year, notwithstanding the attempts at upgrading some engineering on that keyboard, and its slightly better sound system over the 2015.
A colleague mentioned 2020 with the M1 chips, over models with M2 chip
My wife’s M1 Air is significantly faster than my 2015 rMBP was…and my 14 inch M1 MBP is faster still. So…depending on your needs and what you want your laptop to be…the M1 Air is a pretty sweet setup. I found the screen too small for me for Lightroom work after using the 2015 for it….which was why I got the 14 MBP instead. Thought about the 16 but most of my LR work is on the Studio now anyway except for when I’m traveling…and the weight factor helped me make the decision even though I would actually have preferred the larger screen.
In terms of look and feel, the M1 MacBook Pros resemble the 2015 MacBookPros more than the last Intel generation. When I got mine, I laughed about how similar it was.