New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft

The headphone jack position is a deal-breaker.

Why? The SP4 does replace a laptop, but there's still a trade off there. It depends just how productive you want to be on the go.

The type cover is amazing for its size and weight. But it is still a thin and relatively small keyboard. The Surface Book has a more robust keyboard but is thicker and weighs more.

I feel like the SP4 is a laptop replacement. But the Surface Book can be also while also acting like a laptop in some situations. They're both interesting, just boils down to the user's needs.

I'd likely buy a SP4, but can understand why others would be a SB.

Exactly. MBP is so lightweight and robust that you can take it anywhere where you would take a tablet. Since I got my MBP I completely stopped using the Nexus 10 tablet (which I used a lot before that). The battery lasts as long for similar workloads, it's quiet, and having trackpad means that your screen doesn't get greasy. Having keyboard at hand is a plus. I really cannot think of a situation where a developer would prefer tablet-with-a-touch-screen type of interface.

Yes, it's good great quality hardware -- for a Unix laptop. That was one of the biggest reason why a lot of developers who used to work with Unices on servers switched to PowerBook. Back then, Linux really lagged behind in that regard, even on ThinkPads.

The next big boost was a GUI and market situation that made it possible to create some neat productivity tools (and profit from them).

The early Ruby on Rails community probably was the epitome of that setup: TextMate as a uniquely OS X editor, easy development on your laptop, then deployment to a Linux server. I think Keynote came out right at that time, too, which was really neat for a rather weirdly conference-driven community.

Then the pretty great Unibody systems came out, combining the aircraft destroyer feel of olden Thinkpads with a more sleek design, and the first of the ultrabooks, the Air… And, of course, you basically have to use a Mac system when doing iOS dev work.

But in the recent years, I feel that Apple lost it a bit. OS X is stagnating (what's the last feature that could compete with e.g. Expose? And still no decent 1st-party package manager). Third party development/productivity software doesn't matter that much these days (it's either webapps or mobile apps; no really shiny single-platform editor anymore). Some of the Linuxens are pretty good with supported laptop hardware, so that's an option for the Unix hardcore.

And as this article is showing, Windows itself is getting more of an option even if you're not buying into the MS stack: RAM and hard drives are big enough to support virtual machines for your development environment (esp. w/ docker/vagrant/etc.) -- if you even need that, as high-speed internet is ubiquitous enough so that you can do remote development throughout.

So, yeah, while I personally still think that OS X is a more developer/hacker-friendly environment than Windows, the incentives don't appear as big anymore. So if they lose their edge in hardware quality, style and solid driver support, they'll lose a few developers more.