I am a developer. I had used Linux on a laptop from way back in 2005. I have been using Vim for development for at least 10 years now and only recently switch to Spacemacs.

Like many developers who use vim or vim key bindings, my first thought on this was, well, where’s the ESC key going to be? And then I realized I probably will bind it to CAPSLOCK. I don’t use it for CTRL. If anything, reaching for that ESC key is hard on my fingers. I had worn out the tiny ESC key on laptops before.

I’d like to address some points brought up in this article. I agree with many, I think Apple is a long decline. Having also seen the changes from Maverick -> Yosemite -> El Capitan and now macOS, I knew there were incremental changes that were moving the MBP away from being a great developer laptop.

However, I also know that in the bigger picture, our jobs and livelihood as software developers will change. There will be less direct coding, and only old fogies like me would know it. It will be seen as a black art. The generation growing up right now may never see lines of code or version control, and instead train AI modules that fit together like lego blocks.

It’s the same with power and speed on the MBP. No one has really advanced their clock speed. I mean, seriously, if I want high CPU clock speeds, I might as well get one of those POWER9 workstations running Linux — but what would I use that for? I don’t write games. I don’t write AIs. And if I wrote AIs, I would want access to say, one of those NVIDIA deep-learning-in-a-box and hook it up to the laptop via a high-speed connector.

I used to run Linux VMs to do development. I write mostly backened code, so it isn’t as if I need to run Windows to test things in the front end. 16 GB is plenty, and yeah, 32 GB would be nice, but I can live without it.

My point is that change is happening. Change is always scary. You might not always agree with change — I certainly don’t always — but change is, paradoxically, the one constant. Change means letting something go and letting something die for something else to come in.

So RIP Macbook Pro for developers. It’s not so much that Apple is losing it’s way, it’s that even if it doesn’t look like it, even developers and how they develop will also be disrupted and become obsolete.