We had a Mac Server at work for a while. The hardware seemed great (though the fans were loud), but the guy who bought it and ran it said that Apple had poor quality control on updates (e.g. reset users file permissions on updates, IIRC) - stuff that never should have been allowed to make it through QC.

People writing apps for iOS aren't doing it on their phones. They need a reasonably powerful desktop to do that, so they need to keep OS X macOS updated and they need compelling hardware to run the compilers and so forth. And presumably they're not filling their server farms with iMacs or MacMinis....

It really is hard to figure out what those guys are thinking. They have more money than the FSM, but they let their computing hardware rot on the vine.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've considered getting a mid-2012 13" i7 MBP off of eBay as a mess-around non-Winders laptop. My Chromebook is OK, but there are times when I want to save things locally and it's a pain on that. They're pretty easy to upgrade to 16 GB and a SSD and will run the latest OS, but they're kinda heavy...

:-/

Good luck!

Cheers,
Scott.