The reason you care about those features isn’t because you’re a programmer specifically, it’s because you happen to have a personal preference for those things.
- Why should a programmer care about the display really at all? Text can easily be displayed with very high contrast. Matte or glossy shouldn’t matter very much.
- Why would a programmer ever need more RAM than an Adobe Creative Suite or Blender user? I do all my programming on a system with 8GB of RAM and my biggest memory bottleneck is Chrome.
- What would a programmer need a lot of storage for? Text?
- Everyone needs long battery life, and the M1 is industry-leading in that regard for basically all tasks. Why does a programmer need to remove the battery if it lasts beyond a full work day?
- Self-service repair is important for people who know how to do that. While I agree that computers should be built with repairability in mind, and that Apple scores poorly in that regard, programming itself is a software skill, not hardware. You don’t have to know how to repair or build a computer to be a programmer, and if you don’t know how to do it then your ability to do your own repair is less important. I.e., if you have to pay someone a labor cost make upgrades and repairs, you might not prioritize that aspect of the system.
One of the best programmer laptops on the market is the MacBook Air. You can regularly buy it for under $1000, the battery goes for 12+ hours real world usage, it has no fan and stays cool, it’s got a great keyboard and trackpad, it’s faster than laptops that cost hundreds more, and it’s very light and portable with a small power brick.