The only developers I know who are replacing their pre-touchbar machines right now with new ones are those making much of their living from iOS / OS X. Many (like me) are kind of hanging on, because it's a pain to change OSs, lose much of the software we love etc. I'm still undecided, but I think my current (ageing) MB Pro is going to be my last.
> The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin
Yep. I shifted from Linux to OS X years ago because I was sick of tech fiddling and wanted to have a machine that needed no hand-holding and let me get on with my work.
There seem to be no good options.
This is why I use LTS Ubuntu. I don't do any sysadmin work at all. Every couple of weeks or so a dialog opens up saying there are updates, and I click OK. Everything "just works".
Unhappy people post a LOT more and the internet loves a good pile-on. Apple has had plenty of embarrassing QA lapses but the average developer is fine, and it’s not like everything else is perfect. The Linux users I work with spend more time on sysadmin work than the Mac users by a hefty margin, although there’s a good argument that software compatibility is worth that overhead.