I always felt that the price/quality ratio was way off with MacOS, compared to a good regular laptop. By good I mean top 10% ranked by price/quality. Even if it wasn't, Apple's general hostility towards consumers is infuriating. Right-to-repair is a banal example.
It gives you a well rounded OS with a Unix terminal. I think MacOS is more consistent than Windows or Linux with a better attention to details (though I haven't used Linux for almost a decade so things might have changed a bit) which make it more pleasant to use.
Also, the previous generation of Macbook Pros was just really good, sturdy hardware. Hopefully the new update will fix the flaws of the new design.
Lastly, a lot of people get laptops from their company, and companies don't mind a one time extra cost of a few hundred dollars.
I'm currently writing this from a Dell laptop, and I have to say, while the hardware has caught up with the Macbooks in terms of build quality, I still miss MacOS.
Yes, and seemingly in the web backend crowd too (Ruby, PHP, Python but not as much AFAICT).
If you go to a web conference and don't pull out a Mac, you do get comments and/or questions (depending if you're running Windows or Linux).
At Python conferences I've seen fewer Macs and more of the good old ThinkPads running Linux. My feeling is that community has a more "Computer sciencey" taste in laptops, because they're not all web programmers.
Or maybe just because they _can_ be bothered to spend a few days setting up their laptop just right and actively maintain it.
I'm a fairly advanced user but I can't be bothered to do so on a laptop and would rather have a Mac to carry around and GNU/Linux on my desktop.
Once you're price-insensitive, the quality looks good for macs, keyboard issues notwithstanding.
Unfortunately, Replay hooks into low-level OS system calls to do the recording, which makes it non-trivial to support other platforms.
I have started using a Chromebook with 8G of memory and like it much more ... but I am probably in the minority. :(