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Discussion on: What dev machine would you buy today with a budget of around $3,000?

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Jesse Ditson

I've been on the new MBP w/touchbar for a few months daily, and the escape key is a non-issue. You rest your finger on it a few times a month and eventually you stop.

Some of the touchbar features like sliding controls for brightness/volume are neat, but it's about net-neutral on positives vs things that a sec to adjust to.

New keyboard is fantastic but takes some getting used to. Screen clarity is unmatched by anything I've ever used, paired with a 5k LG at work it's super crisp. I work mostly on mobile so being able to see fonts clearly is huge for me.

I've used linux setups before, and it's amazing if you're in docker all day, but unless that's pretty much your only job the IDE support on mac is far better. It's also tough to be in a shell that isn't the first priority of common binaries like node.

Mac has the attention of the dev community, and while it's probably cheaper in the short term to do a linux box, I wouldn't use it as my main until I was sure it wasn't going to slow me down (use a cheap one for a month before buying something with power).