[sauere]

This is a question that will result in highly opinionated answers, but here is my shoot.

First of all: a good company will let you choose your own tools, whatever you feel the most productive with.

So why Apple? The hardware is nice but i think the key here is the operating system. It gives you a painless UNIX experience out of the box, without the Desktop Linux quirks (driver incompatibilities, multimedia issues etc.).

What are you using right now? Windows? The majority of "modern" software development seems to happen on UNIX-based systems (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674), so Windows is often treated as a second class citizen. It misses many essential command line utilities and in general simply does not encourage a command line workflow. Setting up a decent Node/Ruby/Python/whatever environment can be a real pain on Windows. I'm not saying it's impossible, just very painful. So unless you are working exclusively with Microsoft technology, Windows seems to becoming worse every year in regards to software development.

By the way this is coming from someone who has used a Debian/Windows dual boot setup for many years and switched to a MacBook just two years ago.

[bbcbasic]

I agree when trying to do Haskell dev on Windows it is painful sometimes things don't install that would install on Linux. On the other hand I think the .NET stack + VS is an excellent stack to use BUT you are developing for Windows and nothing else pretty much. Mono excepted but not realistic for a lot of things.