It's really only required for iOS/Mac development. The hardware is solid and you don't often have to think about it but I think OS X is a hinderance and a time sink for serious programming work outside of the platform specific stuff.
It's especially painful (subjective) to, for instance, get a rails dev or any number of other environments up and running and it's really annoying to do some embedded systems work on macs. (I say this as someone who makes his living developing iOS apps on a mac right now btw)
It's especially painful (subjective) to, for instance, get a rails dev or any number of other environments up and running and it's really annoying to do some embedded systems work on macs. (I say this as someone who makes his living developing iOS apps on a mac right now btw)