There were basically three things that made Macbooks very appealing to developers before: 1) Very good hardware at a not-huge markup when compared apples-to-ap

There were basically three things that made Macbooks very appealing to developers before: 1) Very good hardware at a not-huge markup when compared apples-to-apples (haha) with Wintel hardware. 2) Unixy OS with outstanding Just Works but it's not your fault should it fail to Just Work, as in "ugh Tom's laptop won't connect to the projector again, because he insists on running Linux." 3) Excellent pick-up-and-go, thanks to a good, if not comprehensive, port selection, the best touchpad in the industry by a long shot and the only one I've ever used that doesn't make me start looking around the room for a mouse or feel like I need to keep one in my laptop bag, and battery life much better than the typical "get you from one outlet to another" of many (especially budget and midrange) Windows devices, while also being (yeah, yeah) thin and light. You could just grab your laptop and go, and be ready for most things, for most of a workday, no power cord, no mouse, no anything. The 1st and 3rd of these have suffered a lot lately, with large price hikes putting them solidly back in the "LOL WUT?" pricing territory they periodically flirt with, and 3 thanks to #DongleLife making it pretty much impossible to plug anything "in the wild" into a Macbook at all without an adapter, and the keyboard going from good-enough to fairly-crappy. I'm hoping for fixes to some of the problems and for some of the "...and all those improvements, and we're also dropping the price $200!" announcements they did pretty regularly there for a while, because man, I still don't see any real competition for them out there, despite their missteps.