I happen to be a developer as well, so I want a machine I can travel with that's powerful enough to get everything done when I'm remote, and can drive a big external monitor when I'm home.

But for people who are writers and nothing else, I think the retina display was a big draw when the machine first came out.

The point I was trying to make above is that people who code, or use a pro laptop for editing or whatnot, still have to do a lot of writing as part of their job. So the keyboard on these machines matters a lot. And pro-users tend to be on their laptops all the time, which makes the ergonomic issues more important.

So this was quite misleading, as a developer myself I completely understand why you'd want a MBP but I was explicitly referring to writing-only work...