Knowledge work requires that a worker’s main computer be portable, robust, reliable, and easily connected to other systems. Cost is less relevant when evaluating the single most important tool used 8-16 hours every day. (Do you see professional chefs scimping on their main knife?) The best possible tool for doing knowledge work is therefore a Macbook Pro. Getting one will actually improve your life. You’ll get work done more quickly and feel the negative effects of that work much less.
That statement is going to illicit all kinds of hate — especially from Linux people. It get it. I hate Apple as well. It doesn’t matter. Macbook Pro computers are overwhelmingly preferred by people who do knowledge work professionally and have been since the creation of macOS with its powerful BSD-derived terminal interface. I’ve been using one since 1997 and recently been reminded of this fact in a big way. Here’s why I think so.
Laptops are more productive. Every time I see someone with their big, overpriced monitors I just laugh. They claim it makes them more productive. It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Productivity comes from focus and availability, not a bunch of distraction on overpriced, impossible to move monitors. Almost every one of the claims these people make is addressed by pairing a good phone or tablet and/or a powerful server to go with their laptop. Most knowledge work does not benefit from lots of screen real-estate, but does benefit from focus. Not everyone’s a day trader or systems operations performance person monitoring a bunch of things at the same time. Even these people are moved to a system of alerts and automation over massive, wasteful screen bloat. No matter where you are with a laptop you can take your work with you, giving a presentation, in a conf room, sitting on the toilet, warming your feet on your sleeping wife’s ass in bed, or busting a different yoga pose every hour to keep your body from becoming fused to a chair with blood clots forming in your legs. Any seconds gained from multiple monitors are lost when you count all those times you could have worked but didn’t because you couldn’t take all those monitors with you.
Laptops are better on your body. Ever notice how completely out of shape most people with a great chair and single desktop workstation are? I don’t think it is a coincidence. The fattest I’ve ever become was when I was working from a chair every day for 10+ hours at a time, mostly because I wanted to stream while doing it and streaming does take a consistent, specialized system locking me down and making me fat. No more. My health has been the single biggest difference I have noticed over the last three months. I feel better, more free, and have much less stress. I can go and do anything and take work with me. Such is not the case when I built in hard-dependencies into my workflow on a bunch of monitors from the same torturous chair. No, not even the best chair can top the health benefits provided from you get from a laptop. Hell, you can even work from your laptop while walking on a treadmill, spinning, even at the gym. Save all that wasted money on a silly, over-priced chair and bump up the capacity of your Macbook Pro instead. You’ll be grateful you did.
Mac is the largest UNIX distro on the planet. It’s reported that Apple paid good money to obtain the official designation as the “largest UNIX distribution on Earth” and it’s true. I might hate how Jobs went about shamelessly stealing the best UNIX variant he could find for NeXT and then forcing it on Apple as a condition of his return to restore the failing company to health, but it just doesn’t matter. The “darwin” OS is robust and frankly an impressive accomplishment given its seemless integration with the best main-stream graphical user interface of any computer ever created.
BSD UNIX keeps it real. Using BSD variations of UNIX keeps Mac users astutely aware that Linux is not UNIX, which is a great thing because the number of non-Linux UNIX computers out there is astonishingly high, just not well known because most UNIX systems are deep in the bowels of enterprise and academia. Beginners fail to recognize this until they are forced to support some old SunOS or AIX systems out there at work and can’t even list all the running processes because they’ve learned the ps command incorrectly. And let’s face it, other than LXC containers (which is a huge thing) BSD UNIX is orders of magnitude better than Linux (and always has been). This is why you see BSD in most router and switch hardware, not Linux.
Everything else can be run in a container or VM. Podman Desktop, VMWare, and QEMU have made it so that any other application, from any other operating system, can be run on a powerful Macbook Pro. At first I thought the Arm-based Macs might have destroyed that capability, but the industry has responded in a big way. QEMU on a Mac is far and away much better than WSL2 in every way for getting stuff done. The only you cannot do well on a Mac is anything do with with 3D, gaming, modeling, etc. But we are talking about knowledge work not gaming. Everyone knows you should just join the PC master race and get a dedicated Windows machine for gaming, duh.