Replace the macbook with a beaten up Thinkpad with 4th-5th gen Intel CPU, then it's more realistic.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Yeah, who the hell associates macs with higher competence? Before the 00s, I associated mac users with stumbling on the worse option but not realizing it, after the 00s, wanting to follow trends and/or overpay for hardware to seem rich. They've always been form over function, and simplicity over power, which are things that novice uses look for, not more experienced ones.
Or maybe more experienced ones when most of those experiences went badly and little was learned.
I think the point is not that it's a MacBook, but that the senior is using a single laptop instead of a full multi-monitor setup.
Personally as a senior, I use 4 monitors. My eyes are too shit to stare at a tiny laptop screen all day, and I want slack/browser/terminal windows on their own screens. It's much more comfortable as well.
A MacBook pro, if you're into the apple ecosystem, is a solid option. You can run Linux and Windows in parallels and do your development on there, and for a lot of development workloads it's sufficiently performant.
I like my system76 laptop, but I ran a MacBook pro for a couple years and it was solid, and this was over 10 years ago.
Advertising, and Apple buying up some professional software to discontinue their non-Apple versions (as well as disabling customization as "they know better than the users") made it equal with "professionalism".
Im pretty sure its mostly battery life.
You can pry my T440 from my cold dead hands or, at the least, give me a bit of notice so I can fish out my X220. Or my X80. Or my other X220. Or my T420... I might have a problem.
There's far better bourbon out there, seniors.
Pfft JD is trash no self respecting senior would by such short whiskey
Let's see how many people agree with me that both poor communication and alcohol are not really signs of professional seniority
I agree, i also want to add that bad financial decisions are not professional (buying over-priced hardware) but i suppose you don't care if the salary is high soo
How about getting the people who pay you to buy you over-priced hardware?
I'd personally prefer more hardware for the money, including when its being bought by others. But I also have to replicate client environments (though at a much smaller scale), so its kind of a cheat code for "buy me that" or "I'll be keeping this for 6-9 months and you can buy me a replacement when this one gets delivered to you".
I think I need another GPU heavy project.
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Except every single MacBook you can buy right now (directly, from Apple, not second hand) directly beats pretty much every other device in its price range - unless you go super crazy with the specs and want to do 128GB RAM with an M5 Max and 8TB storage.
So it's hardly overpriced.
I’ve been diehard anti-Apple for anything but their mobile devices (iPhone, ipad) for most of my life. Overpriced, underpowered. Now I own a MacBook Pro M4 and I just can’t get over how good it is. What a turnaround their change to Apple Silicone has made, it’s actually wild to me.
MacBooks, specifically, are still expensive but actually value for money now.
I hear the base M5 is a pretty big leap forward in terms of performance, compared to even the M4. I ALSO hear Apple is still comparing them to the M1 because people with M1s are still hard to convince to upgrade so there's no point in marketing it to M4 owners.
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A m4 macbook air is $800 and absolutely stomps every laptop even remotely in that price bracket
I don't think the image is trying to indicate professional seniority, it seems to me to try to represent seniority from an experience standpoint
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If I resort to using a Mac I want someone to put me out of my misery.
Honestly, between the MBP and a similarly priced Dell as a company laptop, i choose the MBP.
The battery is better, the screen is better, performance is better, etc
Dell doesn't know how to make a laptop & windows sucks ass. Macos is so locked down by default that all the restrictions on a company laptop don't change the user experience all that much.
In an ideal world, id love a debian thinkpad or framework. But we don't live in an ideal world, so had to choose between the two worst possible options
I was able to buy my M1 MBP from my company for cheap and the laptop is amazing. Its like 4 years old now but it doesnt feel like its aged a day. Easy 6 hour battery life while doing heavy tasks and it performs like a beast. It's faster than my desktop at many tasks such as compilation.
M CPUs make me a believer in ARM and other non-x86 chips, but preferably RISC-V in the long term.
At least you have an option. I'd take a Macbook Pro/Ultra w/e over my Dell laptop any day. I'd prefer Linux but no to that too. Our company is Dell laptops and Windows only. That's it. I'm sure our MDM software could work on Mac/Linux but every time I've asked they've said no.
Brutal, i worked in b4 consulting before. They had Macs but you basically had to know someone to fight for it on your behalf.
I feel your pain, i struggled with a dell craptop for years. I swear to god, those things are designed to be awful.
(Although, shortly before i left i saw the new ones they were handing out which had Ryzen CPUs and actually looked pretty decent, but idk how well they worked because i left obv)
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Well m-series macs are decent spec and reliability wise, but repairability is a shitshow. I'd buy one if I could afford it (but I suspect the keyboard is terrible). Edit: Linux in a few years is possible.
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23:22? Nah mate, my work phone turns off the moment I step through the gate. If someone chose to wait until after 16:00, they can wait until next morning to be told to fuck off.
If I interpret the mac as just any laptop then I kind of agree. The more experience I have gained the less I care about how many monitors I have or how fancy my keyboard is. I do require linux though.
No the keyboard is important. There are so many truly awful keyboards out there that have no travel on the keys.
I absolutely cannot stand the keyboard on the MacBook air. It's so incredibly cheap and it appears to be made out of the same material that they package luxury chocolates in.
Keyboard is critical to me. I can work on a MacBook keyboard short term but something like a Glove80 or at least an Ergodox is critical for me in the long term.
Also OS X Unix is nix enough for me.
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I'm an alcoholic how do I translate this skill into becoming a dev? Serious question.
get hired as an entry level Q&A, drink with the devs when you break their shit.
they'll accept you eventually.
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The best, brightest, most complicated thing I've done in IT became obsolete in 4 years.
That's not true. I prefer wine and Scottish whisky
System admin. This is still relevant
I used to prefer Jameson poured into my coffee when I worked somewhere with 6 hours of zoom meetings a day. I don't care what the laptop is,really, as long as it's not running windows and it has a buttload of ram. It's usually provided by whoever I'm working for anyway.
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