For $1699 you can get either: 13" MacBook Air with 2.0GHz i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, or 13" MacBook Pro Retina, 2.5GHz i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD Don't worry about

For $1699 you can get either: 13" MacBook Air with 2.0GHz i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, or 13" MacBook Pro Retina, 2.5GHz i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD Don't worry about the Air's CPU speed, the i7 actually Turbo Boosts to 3.2GHz, vs the Retina i5's 3.1GHz, plus it has an extra 1MB of cache. The choice is basically crazy good display vs larger SSD. Try using Mac OS X (depending on the type of development you are doing). It can run almost anything Linux can, plus a lot of stuff Linux can't (Netflix, WebEx, MS Office, Photoshop). Don't pretend your laptop is a production environment, it will lead to problems, use Vagrant to run a realistic production environment.