I use a 2011-vintage 17" Macbook Pro. I'll maintain it as long as I can. Memory is maxed out and it has an SSD. It performs about as well as a new one would, pl

I use a 2011-vintage 17" Macbook Pro. I'll maintain it as long as I can. Memory is maxed out and it has an SSD. It performs about as well as a new one would, plus it has a full suite of ports. Besides programming, I also use it for music recording and photo editing, so the generous screen real estate is very helpful. (Useful fact for those who love their old MBPs... Apple will do an "anything" repair for $300. They'll fix anything and everything they find wrong. I had my motherboard replaced last year that way.) For the development itself, I do everything in Vagrant. That way, I get my nice Mac and nice editor (Textmate), with a predictable and repeatable build and test environment. I could just check out my code onto a different computer with Vagrant installed, and pick up where I left off.