> I'd suggest the Thinkpads, by all means, but I wouldn't ban everything else The author specifically mentioned the need for a complicated setup including hard

> I'd suggest the Thinkpads, by all means, but I wouldn't ban everything else The author specifically mentioned the need for a complicated setup including hard disk encryption. I take that as meaning the development environment includes some company secret that should be protected as if they were nuclear launch codes. Which, in turn, is difficult to do at all and hideously difficult to do on your own. I've always been both a happy Linux user and a happy Thinkpad user, but I guess it'd be a productivity boost if you let people choose between different models (e.g., a 15", a 14" and a 12" model, because people have different tradeoffs between mobility and primary screen size). And if the contents of your development environment has vaguely less security impact than nuclear launch codes, you should consider how much productivity exactly you're willing to forego for reasons of paranoia. (Using a different development environment is pretty much bound to lead to distractions because you need to actively think about key combinations etc., especially when switching between the braindead-but-largely-consistent Mac key combos and the more-standard-but-sometimes-less-so Linux app key combos).