As a late 2013 Macbook user, I'm trying to grasp the point of this question. I could see asking in a poll, for example. Or I can understand you telling us what you do, that you are searching for a new laptop, and then asking what we do + use so that you could find people who do the same things as you and see what they use. But to just ask "Which MacBook do you use for development?" - it just seems like you left a lot on the table. Development is a very broad term. I might "develop" an HTML-only website, for example, and just write a little JS here and there. I pull up fiddler/etc and that's it. But I "develop". If I give you my Macbook specs, that doesn't help you if you are a more rigorous dev.
15" 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display + Thunderbolt display. OSX and Ubuntu VM, can't deside what is best of Ubuntu and OSX.
Used a MacBook Air 11" before the 15", I miss it :/
Any one dual booting Ubuntu and OSX?
15" early-2011 non-retina MBPRO with i7 and 8GB of RAM with OSX 10.9
I'm planning an SSD upgrade, within 1 year from now.
13" 2013 macbook air, thinking about installing Ubuntu or Mint Linux which I think is much more flexible and open.
Why do you ask?
I've got a 2011 11" air, but my main machine is a Lenovo U260, which is my favorite.
I have a MBPro Retina and I'm not enjoying developing on it much like I did on my Ubuntu box. I wanted to know what developers on Mac used.
Is it really the hardware that is making the difference though? I suspect it would be the change in OS is the biggest change (unless you're running Ubuntu on your mac)
Not really. I sold my Mac to use the Ubuntu box so I'm kind of familiar with the OS. The problem for me is the display. I'm weirdly obsessed with "beautiful" code. By beautiful I mean code that looks elegant in the text editor. If I'm fiddling with my text editor I'm either changing fonts or color schemes to get the best view for the code.
15" 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display + 22" secondary display + PC keyboard & logitech mouse
13" 2013 macbook air, used to use a Ubuntu VM but switched to just using OS X
15" 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display plus Thunderbolt display
13" 2011 Air, dev work done in Arch Linux run through VBox.