There are a lot of other good options... Lenovo Yoga, Dell XPS which now have 4K screen, a good touch pad, speakers, etc...

If anything, you should need a Mac much less now that nearly everything is cross-platform. With tech like virtual machines, Docker, etc.... You should not need a Mac and if your company requires it for some reason, you definitely do not need a Mac to get started so I'm not too worried about it.

Apple rips people off everywhere... US, India, Canada, etc... It'll stop once people stop paying for it. The way to stop this madness is not to give Apple your money and then complain about it, it's to not give Apple your money and convince others not to either. Then the price will drop.

I have a Macbook Pro 15" maxed out specs, a MSi gaming laptop, 2 Lenovo Thinkpads, one of which has 32GB of RAM, and a custom-built desktop with a Ryzen 9 3900X 4,0Ghz 12-core processor, 64GB of RAM at 3600MHz, Radeon RX580 with 8GB of VRAM and 4k, OS drive with a SSD capable of 4.5GB/s write and 5.0GB/s read speeds, and a backup SATA SSD.

This thing blows all the Macs at work out of the water. I've had it for 2 months now and I've not had 1 blue screen of death... I can run 2 Ubuntu Virtual Machines, 2 Windows Virtual Machines, do 4K video editing and encoding, and do all of that AT THE SAME TIME hooked up to 3 monitors without any lag. In fact, the CPU usually is at 10% usage max with 2-4 VMs going. I recently wrote a Rust program in one of my VMs that scanned 10 million lines of text and ran an algorithm on them all in 172ms.

Apple makes comparable machines to the desktop I own, but they are $8,000 more. I repeat, if I would have gotten a Mac, it would be $8,000 MORE than my desktop costs. Plus, it would not be upgradable.

I use VMWare and WIndows 10. Windows has gotten A LOT better. I also hate those glossy screens.

Point is, I can do anything on this computer at home that I can do at work on my Mac, plus more honestly. And guess what? It costed $1,300 less than you paid in India for that thing. A new coder has to be smart and get the machine for his/her budget that will allow them to write and run code. Most people do not need and may never need a computer as powerful as mine for basic coding... But to the seasoned vets, I recommend thinking twice before giving Apple $2,000 more on some hardware that by the way cannot be opened, modified, cleaned out, etc... Watch LinusTechTips and Louis Rossman on Youtube.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Macs are bad machines at all. I'm happy with my Mac at work. But that's because I didn't pay for it. That being said, my home Windows computer I mentioned above is faster than all the Macbooks in my entire work pod combined.

It is so weird that in countries where purchasing parity should come to the aid of the locals, it is instead the opposite. $100 in the US is not of the same value as $100 in India. The value of $100 in india is much higher meaning, if anything is to go by, that the cost of the same Macbook in India should be cheaper.

So Relevant to the context of this discussion and fully applicable to me as well...