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I don't understand the allure of the laptop for developers.

For me, performance easily beats portability. I also have a laptop, but I'd never use it as a primary desktop.

I run my own company and have a home office and a regular office, each with a mouse, keyboard, and big monitor. With my laptop I can just take it back and forth - all files come with me and the machine is in the exact state when I boot it up at home as when it was at the office.

If I need to go out of town, I just take the laptop with me and I can do everything I would normally do, just with a smaller screen.

At least for web development, speed usually isn't an issue ... putting in an SSD drive a year or so ago, though, was the best thing I did - very noticeable speed increase!

So, for me it's a convenience factor.

Anecdotes are generally worse than meaningless. Still, in the spirit of things, I don't think I know a single MacBook user; sampling biases clearly exist.

Tangentally: One is inclined to wonder, if dual display support is such a big deal, why they all use hardware incapable of it.

do your developer friends use linux laptops, or windows running linux vm?

One MacBook to rule them all