> Buy any laptop, stick Linux on it, get working.

Except it's still a slightly different challenge each time to "get it working", each different PC. A Mac is a Mac is a Mac, more or less.

I have a Framework laptop on my desk running Kubuntu alongside my Macs. It's nice, and every now and then I check in with it, make sure I could switch to it if I needed to, do all my important tasks, plug it in so the stupid mainboard battery does not go flat.

I satisfy myself that I can, and then I go back to my Mac, because even Tahoe isn't painful enough to switch and because I personally prefer it. But KDE is fine and I'll use it if circumstances dictate I have to.

I think critics misunderstand the extent to which Mac-using devs are "locked into Apple's ecosystem". Unless you're writing iOS apps, you aren't. You perhaps even exist in a more heterogeneous world (Mac and Linux, Mac and Windows, all three, whichever it is) than a Linux-using web dev does.

Essentially everything I run is not at all "locked in". I would miss the ease of keychain, handoff and Apple Notes (which I like despite its flaws). I would miss the specific way Exposé works, the way full screen apps work that I happen to like, and then I'd deal with it. I'd probably carry on using an iPhone (I am really ambivalent about the iPad)

FWIW my "Apple ecosystem" is why I have been able to teach myself how to use open weights/open source AI at a pragmatic level, because my secondhand off-the-shelf kit does an acceptable job of running open weights without me yet[0] having to specify some big PC I don't have enough use for as a non-gamer. A lot of people have solved a lot of general problems that I don't have to tinker with too early.

This isn't a fanboy thing (I would consider myself a qualified critic). Both KDE and GNOME have some nice things. It's just a question of energies.

IIRC it was Adrian Cockcroft who said he used Sun at work, and a Mac at home, because performance tuning was his day job and he didn't want to do it at home; I think this resonates.

It has been my own choice for 28 years, largely; Mac plus linux.

[0] I will do this, possibly quite soon. That tinkering is coming. But my ordinary Mac was a gateway to it.