Wait did I misunderstand what bikeshedding is? I thought it was the phenomenon where people who have input on project management, but not the skills/background/inclination to wrestle with the hard parts of the project, tend to focus on peripheral issues that they understand better. So, for example, a committee that is supposed to be planning a new hospital spends meeting after meeting arguing about the particulars of the construction of the bike shed, but just rubber stamps the first suggestion they get regarding OR floor plans or whatever, because the committee members can all understand bike sheds but most of them don’t use operating rooms.

If the problem is that you’re thinking of buying a new laptop, it doesn’t seem like bikeshedding to spend time thinking about what kind of laptop you’d like.

What kind of stuff is he doing that anything less than top of the line isn’t acceptable, and he replaces it every 1-2 years? That’s a wild upgrade cycle, and since he’s describing a pretty awesome machine, seemingly quite wasteful. My previous daily-driver laptop got replaced 7 years in (and even then it’s still functioning, the years of “abuse” made it hard to use as a laptop, so now it sits around as one of many servers).

I agree that MacBooks would be pretty great if it wasn’t for the operating system.

Seems like he doesn’t want to spend time getting the hardware to work. He wants it to be efficient and of high quality.

A MacBook not locked down by Apple with plenty of supporting documentation for all the hardware.