If you're being paid professional programmer rates you should get the best machine, not the one where price-performance hits some sweet spot. If the cost of a d

If you're being paid professional programmer rates you should get the best machine, not the one where price-performance hits some sweet spot. If the cost of a developer who wants a Dell is $80,750 and a developer who wants an rMBP is $82,200 (year 1), that developer needs to be 2% more productive over a year to justify it. Hard to measure these things for a lot of folks but I've definitely saved over 2% of my work time from switching from spinning disks to high-end SSD on unit tests alone. Never mind the reduced boot times, how fast 'brew install' is and the general responsiveness. If you're buying it yourself, be cheap, if you're paying someone's massive wage bill, get them the best thing you can.