I'm typing this on my primary machine, a late 2012 MacBook Pro. That's 8 years of full daily use, travel, downloads, compiling, running Docker, etc. And I really do mean every single day, morning onwards. Not saying all MacBooks will stand up that long, but my secondary laptop is a 2010 MacBook Air, and it's still kicking, though OS upgrades aren't available anymore for it. Aside from the keyboard problems of the past few years (one of the reasons I waited to upgrade), I've found them to be very reliable. Even my PowerBook with the Motorola CPU was still running up until a couple of years ago when I cleaned house. And as they can run OSes in VMs (Linux, FreeBSD, Windows ...), I feel the MacBook Pro is the best development platform, and really, best platform for most things. I have mutt installed for email, so you can still run all your CLI 'apps' if you like. Yeah, it is truly an awesome machine. And this one, 2 months before Apple Care expired, I took it in for a 'checkup' -- they replaced over $1,100 worth of parts, including the logic board. I hadn't noticed anything wrong about the machine, but apparently it didn't meet their standards. If you're already leaning that way, buy one, use it for a while, and if it's not what you want later, sell it and consider the loss as you renting the laptop for that period of time. I could upgrade now the keyboards are fixed, but, well, this still works. Now I think I'll wait for the ARM-based MacBooks coming hopefully later this year.