Edit: Jesus Christ, people. If you buy a $150 Thinkpad made by slave labor instead of a $1,200 MacBook made by slave labor, you're still supporting a capitalist economy based on slave labor. We all do. We have no choice. The number of smug liberals in the comments saying "well I buy a cheap used laptop" or "well I buy coffee beans and make my own coffee" are completely missing the fucking point.
Don't tell yourself your consumption is moral. All of us make unethical choices every day because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Accept your shame and guilt and let it drive you to do better.
You don't need a Mac though, in fact in most circumstances using a Mac actively makes performing computer necessary tasks harder than just using the local library computers.
Mac is the bougie flex of choosing to be less productive for the sake of brand clout.
What are you talking about? Macs are wildly popular dev machines.
I've been in a dev environment and have literally seen nothing of the sort
Also, wildly popular doesn't mean wildly effective, even if that was true
Everywhere I've worked for the last 8 years has used Macs for developers. One place I was at started with Windows and people jumped at the opportunity to switch to a Mac when they got the option.
Macs have been standard for my software development career for more than a decade, yes.
They have a lot of Unix stuff but are pretty standardized and widely supported.
Everyone uses docker, which isn't super great on Mac.