Before they can think of "bringing back the pro", they need to stop the bleeding: pros who need to upgrade this year have no choice but to go PC. An upgraded cheese-grater would have been a good stop-gap while they go back to the drawing board on their 2019 product.
Right now I program Rails on an old 2012 MBPr. I want to get a faster machine. Possibilities:
1) Spend 5k on a iMac Pro. That's an absurd amount of money.
2) Get a new MBP limited by USB C, new keyboard, and the abominable Touchbar. That's a lot of money for a downgrade.
3) Get a decent specced iMac or Mac Mini. Most viable option.
4) Ditch Rails, start learning .NET, so I can go Windows 100% to build my own PC. I save money. I lose a lot of time.
5) Build PC, install Linux. Viable but might be a configuration nightmare. I just want to work.
6) Run Linux under Windows host as a VM. Second most viable option.
I'm pretty frustrated. Suggestions?
If you don't have a legal office declared for business activities to the regulators, then yeah it might be zero.
Then good luck in court.
System 76 sells machines with Linux pre-installed. I've had good luck with these (replacing the default Ubuntu with Arch of course).
But:
7) continue developing Rails using Windows 10 and the Windows Subsystem For Linux
Overall my experience with WSL has been great.
Also configuring Linux is not the beast that it was years ago. Even on laptops it is fairly straightforward.
I feel the pain here too. It feels like macbooks have stagnated the last 5 years. I am struggling to do java / microservices development on my MBP. I just don't have the RAM and cores to run a lot of server processes.
The only Macs worth buying now are the iMacs.
I did this, bought an XPS and a precision. Both refurbed in sales/with coupons, great specs. Cost me ~500 less than retail. Both like new.
Sure I'd prefer a mac, but its over double the cost for similar specs. I could look past the touchbar and ports. But not the keyboard
8) buy a librem. I don't know how good they are, though
If you need more power for $2900 you can get a Core I7 4.2Ghz quad core with the same specs.
I'm not a Mac fanboy by any stretch of the imagination - I haven't bought a Mac in 12 years but I want to get away from Windows and don't want to futz with Linux. Getting an iMac would allow me to develop for iOS, Android, Windows, and give me a real Unix environment.
You can do .Net Core with a Mac. I am a Windows developer now, and will probably stick with .Net, but especially for hosted solutions, using Linux is a lot cheaper for deployment.
I suggest an upgraded 2009 Mac Pro.
The upgrades would include: flash to 5,1, 3.46 MHz Intel Hexcore proc, 32 GB RAM, SSD on a PMCIA card, and 5770 GPU. This should cost $1K USD or less, dual CPU (12 core) for a bit more. Mine Geekbenches at 3800 (S) and 17,800 (M).
I'm running one of these and it has been bulletproof and 100% hardware/software compatible.
The iMac Pro is overspecced for Rails development. You can get a very decent Mac for much less. If you keep your work environment synced via iCloud or Dropbox, the problem of syncing I mentioned doesn't exist (I prefer the minor discomfort to syncing through a third party).
As for 6, get a Linux PC and run a Windows VM when you need it. It's better to have the decent OS host the crappy one than the other way around.