I hit a breaking point with the Apple laptops a couple of years ago. It was actually iTunes that drove me off. iTunes Match somehow corrupted and lost a bunch of my music. Forever gone and I didn't have backups. After working with Support for a while, I finally gave up and bought a new ThinkPad T470s and put Arch Linux on it and never looked back. Things work really well and predictably. I have it dialed in just how I like it; every hardware component except the proprietary fingerprint reader is supported. Switching to a tiling window manager has been a huge productivity boost, too.
Now that office suites are in the cloud along with music and everything else, I no longer see the draw of Apple hardware for a developer laptop.
High DPI displays are common on PC laptops now, they generally work well in Linux (not so much for legacy apps but you're unlikely to use those).
I like the touchpad on my X1 Carbon, but I never used a mac long enough to really adapt my workflow to all the touchpad gestures (I think on Linux you'll be happy with general usage/scrolling/etc, but stuff like pinch to zoom is still not widely supported).
High DPI displays are common on PC laptops now, they generally work well in Linux (not so much for legacy apps but you're unlikely to use those).
Surprisingly, some Tk applications that I use irregularly actually work with HiDPI with Tk 8.6 (as in, they are scaled up with an integer scaling factor, and are sharp).
Multiple displays with different DPIs also work with Wayland (I have one 4k screen and a LoDPI display 90 degrees rotated). Though, there are some bugs with GNOME 2.26 on Wayland with HiDPI displays that are switched off and on again (e.g. some applications such as GNOME Terminal become blurry, they seem to be rendered at lower DPI and scaled up). I have reported some bugs and the gnome-shell/mutter developers are quite responsive.
I got used to the touchpad with time and the touchpad drivers have improved, too. It's really not a big deal at all after a few weeks.
HiDPI is generally pretty decent although it's slightly annoying that different layers of the graphics stack (Xorg, GTK2, GTK3, etc.) have different mechanisms for tweaking the scaling but with a few evenings of work, I have everything dialed. A small price to pay for years of use to come. The Arch Linux wiki is super helpful for this.
You want to look for windows precision touchpad support. Turns out the problem with windows touchpads was not the hardware, but the crappy drivers touchpad vendors make. Microsoft made their own drivers and if you can get hardware compatible with those you'll have a much nicer experience.
If you choose a ThinkPad, the trackpoint, three mouse buttons and the perfect keyboard together are such a nice combination I actually disabled the touchpad from bios.
You can get higher resolution displays on other laptops. As for the trackpad most are pretty good now days, although apple is probably still in first place.
I stuck with the hardware (albeit quite old) and went linux for similar reasons.
The older hardware can be quite nice with linux, but my next notebook wont be a mac, not due to value for money (spec and built quality balance is actually quite good for price these days), but because all attempts to run linux or any OSS on the more recent models are a disaster.
I know it's a traditionally good brand for compatibility, but for me they sort of dropped quite far from the top of the list since becoming a chinese owned company and for superfish etc. (To clarify my problem with it being chinese is the prevalence of injecting backdoors into absolutely everything from state or otherwise, and these days we have to worry about hardware too)
If I was to buy right now my list is roughly in the order of:
- Dell XPS 13/15
- Razor Blade (It's getting official linux support soon)
- Librem 13/15
- One of the million and one thinkpad models although I have no idea which
I'm most likely to just wait longer though :P the only thing to die on this old thing so far is the keyboard springs out of sheer wear and the battery. I'm gona replace the keyboard soon myself.
That's like asking someone with Dropbox storage to make sure they have a secondary backup on an external HDD somewhere. It's not that it wouldn't be a good practice, it's that Dropbox should be the one making the backups of their backups.
Now that office suites are in the cloud along with music and everything else, I no longer see the draw of Apple hardware for a developer laptop.