I would like to add that I purchased my mac solely for the purpose of finding out what development would be like on it. I am a C programmer, and I write code in Vim, so in terms of day to day activities, not a lot changes. Until I move into IDE based projects, where I almost always run crying back to my linux machine, and quite regularly the windows one too. I guess it really depends on the environment that you want to set up for writing your code in. Personally though, I would spend all that extra cash on a really nice machine (or even two...) With enough memory for decent virtualization. That way you can even have a Mac VM setup to see what it is like.