probably giving up on my MacBook

I think I’ve gone from worried about my MacBook to “almost ready to consign it to the scrap heap.” I’m pretty sure the hard drive cable has gone bad again, and that’s fixable, but it would be a pain, and the laptop is five years old.

I just spent some time poking around on Reddit and other sites looking at options for a new MacBook. The MacRumors Buyer’s Guide page for Macs is not looking good right now. (Everything I’m interested in gets a “don’t buy” rating.) WWDC is only a few weeks away, but there probably won’t be any hardware announcements there (at least not for Macs).

Since I’m leaving on a business trip today, I’m going to put off making any big decisions on it, but I think I have a few options, none of them perfect:

1. Go ahead and buy a new or refurb MacBook or MacBook Pro, and take my chances with the butterfly keyboard. (Or find a refurb with the previous keyboard.)
2. Get a refurb Mac Mini, so I have a working MacOS machine, at least. Then, over time, figure out if I want to move all my stuff over to Windows so I don’t need MacOS anymore, or if I want to get a good new Mac at some point in the future (after they’ve gotten past the butterfly keyboard issues and/or finally updated the Mac Mini line).
3. Just “rip the band-aid off,” as it were, and give up on MacOS entirely. Buy myself a Surface Book or a new ThinkPad or something like that.

Like I said, none of those options are perfect. My current Windows laptop is still my ThinkPad from 2011. (Which has been solid as a rock, for the most part.) It’s starting to show it’s age now though. The battery life isn’t great. It’s running Windows 10 reasonably well, but I feel like it’s going to hit a wall on that at some point.