Really? I bet you can buy a laptop for 1/10th the price that can do 90% of the same software dev tasks. The only thing the 14" does better is iOS development, which you don't have a choice of machines for anyways. I love a lot of things about the 14" Macbook Pro, but defending it's value proposition is something I can't really understand. It's a $2,000 laptop running the same OS as a $900 laptop, running the same git binary that you execute on a $35 Raspberry Pi. I don't see it.
I suppose you're right if you do absolutely everything on the command line, but in terms of the GUI and GUI applications, there's a world of difference, and once you factor in the Apple ecosystem (so contacts and notes are automatically synched between my phone and my Macs, etc) and the speed and polish of programs like Safari and Numbers, the value proposition becomes quite different. Us Mac users could use our Mac systems as generic Unix/Linux boxes, but few of us actually do.
Visual Studio Code and Jetbrains IDE work the same in Windows/Linux as in Macs. So I don't see the advantage of Mac here.
See Xcode or Nova for examples of real Mac IDEs/editors.
But note that my post was not just talking about development tools. I get work done on my Macs, but I also handle finances, play games, study, write documents, and shitpost on HN. All of those things (with the exception of the "play games" part sometimes) I find more pleasant to do in the familiar environment of a Mac.
I personally don't get all the hate for Xcode, but whatever. To each their own I guess.
Slow and bloated?
I think the only GUI i use is my browser, so Mac is a hard pass for me (also, while apple us keyboard is fine, the French one is utter shit)
Personally, I would rather sell my machine just before the warranty runs out(about 3 years) and buy a new one.
For a Mac, I'm pretty comfortable using the machine outside of its warranty period compared to a PC.
Apple stuff in my experience breaks either in the first few months, or at least 5 years out of warranty (except for the thin keyboards, but I avoided those defective designs).
And I've got her father's 2011 Mac Mini sitting in our TV cabinet running a Plex instance (plus a few other things, like a local internal-only web server). It needs a little fan sitting on top of it to keep it cool enough, but those cost about $10.
Doing it in less time, or without needing to have a wall socket, etc matters, and has value.
Of course in terms of value proposition there's a question: that's why we're asking why it's not on the review sites being compared to other laptops. Otherwise we're stuck with "it benchmarks faster and lasts longer on battery" anecdata.
Yeah, you can theoretically do the same thing, it's just that some things suddenly become feasible if you choose one over the other.