My lab uses mostly thinkpads with a few people having macbooks instead. I have have a thinkpad at work but bought a MB with my own money. So you know my choice.

My lab uses mostly thinkpads with a few people having macbooks instead. I have have a thinkpad at work but bought a MB with my own money. So you know my choice. What I can say is that thinkpad hardware quality varies wildly with some having huge overheating problems (processors to max = system shutdown) while every macbook i have owned (including the air) being absolutely ok with 12h straight of having their cores to the max. Build quality of thinkpads is low-ish when compared to macbooks and they require more attention to cleaning and not being dropped. On the other hand MBs only offer up to 16GB memory which feels arcane and makes it impossible to do a lot of stuff. Apple being stingy with memory is typical across their product ranges. Generally having to run a VM is not something I like to do - unnecessary friction/user time overhead. But the MB is ok for running both native linux and running typical dev stuff on osx (though recent default compiler change to clang is anoying).