In general, macs have great linux hardware support. Also, they have an unrivaled track pad. Seriously, I will keep buying macbooks until I find another multi-touch track pad that is better. Btw, does anybody know of one? To tzury's point, the "homebrew" package manager basically makes it so a mac can act as a decent dev machine. Virtualbox will help fill in those gaps. FWIW, check out the Dell XPS 13 developer edition: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd.aspx. It comes from the factory with Ubuntu loaded and supposedly good developer friendly features