Is it necessary? NO!<p>Is it worth it? Oh gosh yes!! Like a hundred times yes!<p>My development productivity has been measurably an order of magnitude greater after getting the laptop. Just the simple act of opening the laptop and getting to work in a couple of seconds with the machine running at full speed is such a blessing. My experience with windows and even Linux (on laptops), has been that there&#x27;s a slightly long delay in waiting for everything to come alive. Reopening apps would cause slight bits of sluggishness. And overall the performance degraded with each screen close and open cycle (this last bit mostly applies to windows)<p>And the battery life is nuts! Having my MBP has meant that I can pack it up and take it to the car wash place and hack from there since I know the battery is going to last more than 2 hours effortlessly (it actually does 6+ when doing just dev work on a slightly dimmed screen).<p>If someone ever made a linux laptop with this kind of quality and no hardware issues, I&#x27;d switch in a heartbeat. But that laptop doesn&#x27;t exist yet (from my experience), so hands down, for development, if you can afford it, buy the macbook! Zero regrets guaranteed :)