Macs have by far the best build quality for the price, with great displays and hardware as well. They can run most all of the dev tools that you can run on Linux(yeah there is always going to be that one person yelling about X specific thing that doesn't work as it should).

Recently I'm doing iOS dev and you have to use a Mac unless you plan on emulating. iOS strikes me as a platform that so-called hackers would like, seeing as how mobile is a fairly new frontier with unique and undiscovered uses, and Apple is always putting out new iPhones with interesting new hardware and APIs, unlike boring old CRUD webapps and desktop apps which have been stale for years. I was just blown away this week with the amount of insane stuff you can do using GPU hardware acceleration on the newer (5+) iPhones, its like everyone is carrying these little powerhouses around in their pockets. Though I guess you could also say that the closedness of the platform and ecosystem would be repellent to hackers, I personally don't get my panties in a bunch about this, I just like making cool stuff.