With the new keyboard mechanisms and the killing of the escape key on their Pro models Apple has already made their stance with developers clear.

Buy a Windows laptop with nice hardware and run Linux.

I did exactly this (well, "refreshed" vs. bought, as this is a company machine).

Could not be happier. Linux works great for what I do, I have a decent KB, no touchbar, no olympic sized trackpad that just gets in my way, actual PORTS I can use, *nix OS... totally happy.

Yes! Currently I'm in love with Elementary OS as my distro (I was a Mac user so the fancy UI is exactly what I wanted)

I quite like the butterfly keyboards. I find that, after I spent a few weeks getting used to it, I can type much faster and cleaner.

The removal of the escape key makes vim practically unusable, though. I know a few people who have remapped it to a different key, but still..

People should remap it anyways. The escape key is the farthest away key, yet it's the most frequently used key. I have it to `jj`.

I've been using Caps Lock as Esc for around a year now (and Shift + Shift for caps). It's a big ergonomic win for me on both my laptop and desktop keyboards.

ctrl + [

I remember that too. suddenly everybody you saw had a Macbook. I always thought that part of the initial iOS success was that a lot of developers already had Macbooks and were ready to develop apps on it. I think we would have seen much less apps if the Macbook hadn't been that popular before.

If they continue to neglect the Mac platform and devs really start moving away from Mac iOS may suffer quite a bit. Microsoft would have a great opportunity to take over if they made the Surface devices a little cheaper and higher quality. My Macbook 2014 is getting a little old and I am really torn what to do next. The Surface devices we have at work are quite expensive and still not as good as a Macbook but the latest Macbooks are not that appealing either.

I picked up a Surface Laptop 2 a week ago, as a replacement for my older MacBook Air, and so far I’ve been pleased with it. The hardware may not have the fit and finish of a MacBook, but it’s still slim, lightweight and attractive in its own way. The screen is great. And that keyboard...just works.

The article doesn’t mention the Surface product line, it doesn’t contribute much to Microsoft’s revenue, but it allows the company to present itself as a new Microsoft and demonstrate what’s possible with Windows.

If they only could build decent trackpads and gestures that work. On my Macbook I can work perfectly well with only the laptop and the trackpad but on Windows the trackpad doesn't feel right and the gestures are weird.

I'd suggest you consider the Dell XPS line whether you need 13" or 15" laptop. Both laptops have good battery sizes, surprisingly durable coating for what it is, good keyboards, trackpads, screens... And both have a fingerprint reader which works just as well as touch id on a Mac. Oh, and they are very repairable because they're designed to be serviced on-site, so even after warranty runs out, you can service them with quite cheap genuine parts (which are themselves abundant on ebay, amazon, parts-people, aliexpress).

I do have a bias in that I've been a happy user of the two generations of XPS 15 for three years.

I am stuck in the same rut. My 2012 MBP isn't cutting it anymore but I can't see the value in spending $2k for the 2018 MBP.

Get a MB Air 2018. It's about as nice, had TouchID without the Touch Bar (meaning Esc key intact), it's lighter and can be had with 16GB RAM.

Most of my dev is on some cloud somewhere regardless so it's a perfectly capable machine.

The legacy is still there, many conferences and events are dominated by Macs, but it's not the 100% share it was a few years ago and the "get a mac" jokes mean something quite different now.

What does the joke mean now?

They used to be aimed at people struggling to get their Linux machines to connect to projectors, as Macs "just work". They're now aimed at people with Macs in dongle hell.