I just bought a new laptop. The last 3 were powerbooks/macbook pros. I saw the app store on os x and decided on a lenovo this time, running linux (xmonad helped tip that scale).

I'm really glad I went that way. I'm sure that this is a good thing (tm) for most users, and will help avoid all sorts of problems. But the Mac's becoming more of an appliance, and while it's safer, easier, and more convenient for most users, it makes it a substantially less desirable machine for me to hack on.

There's a tradeoff between making the developer environment and user environment closer together -- to make the machine more amenable for hacking, to reduce the wall for development, and to make the platform a good place to learn how to write code -- vs farther, to make it a simpler, safer environment for users. So far, the bias has been on the former, but it's changing.

What's interesting is that this may, for the time being, push app development server-side (to the web) as the client environments become more hack-inhospitable.