> The new APFS filesystem is insanely fast, especially when combined with VSCode's ripgrep-based text search.
I think this must be due to the NVMe drives they use in MacBook Pros. APFS has some performance overhead that makes it slightly slower than HFS+ (but I do think you get other improvements, when copying files etc.).
I own a 2014 MBP I use as my main work laptop. I also own a desktop running Windows 10. I currently maintain a VSCode dev environment for my coworkers who all use Windows.
We switched from XAMPP and Eclipse for PHP development to WSL with VSCode and so far the transition has been really good. The only problem is that OS X still has a way better free MySQL client in the form of Sequel Pro compared to Windows which only has MySQL Workbench and HeidiSQL for the free options. I wish there was a better SQL client we could use.
There are tons of SQL clients for Windows.
Dbeaver, sqlyog (free edition) are a few more free ones that come to mind.
I'm normally very happy with the dev experience on my 2016 MacBook Pro. I run iTerm2 (multiple split panes in a window), zsh/ohmyzsh, homebrew, and VSCode. The new APFS filesystem is insanely fast, especially when combined with VSCode's ripgrep-based text search. I watch my Windows-based colleagues start a VSCode text search in our repo and it takes 10-15 seconds to complete. Me - it's usually less than 5 seconds and often instant. Also, moving/copying/deleting large directories (i.e. 25k+ files) is unbelievably fast.
So macOS is great, in my opinion. But I'm often frustrated with this machine: (a) the keyboard is unreliable - certain keys develop habits of not responding (the `fn` key is currently driving me round the bend), (b) it crashes every time the battery runs low, and (c) my corporate policy installs Sophos which sometimes slows it to an absolute crawl.
From many developers' perspective, Windows' greatest downfall is that it's, well, still Windows. There is so much legacy to maintain, and so many ways that it differs from macOS and Linux at low levels. WSL and the new terminal/PTY are making inroads, but if Microsoft would only fork Debian and build their own supported distro, I can guess that's where we'd all be going very soon. What if they forked Wine as well and built a supported Windows compatibility layer on top?