I am a programmer who is also a musician, and I cannot work with music. If there is music within hearing range, my mind goes to it, 100%. I also used to travel around a bit and teach programming courses. I always asked my classes who could code with music on. Over a ten year period I found that the results were almost exactly 50/50. Some people can love it, others simply cannot write code with music on. For some people silence is distracting and music helps. For others, it seems to be the opposite. My wife is a special ed teacher and she found a similar situation in her classroom. Some kids work better with headphones and music, other not. So, any boss who tries to make a blanket policy on this is going to piss off 50% of the programmers. As a side note, I once was working a contract job at Intel and got dumped into a cube pod surrounded by sales guys who spent most of the day on the phone, loudly doing their job. I went to the group admin assistant and told her of my problem, she brightened up and said, "I have just the thing for that!", and reached into her bottom drawer for a pair of industrial ear protector head phones. Love that factory floor mentality.

I do java development work on two machines, interchangeably: Dell 600m 1.6 gh Pentium M w/ 1 gb RAM with Win XP Pro 12" Mac Powerbook 867mh, 640 meg RAM with OS X 10.3.2 the cost of the two systems was approximately equal, in the low $2K range. On a big java project, full rebuild with Ant, running from inside IDEA, here are the times: PC - 217 seconds Mac - 239 seconds Our application runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The mac is the most pleasant platform to develop on, it has the best UI, and full unix underneath. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't go with the 12", but would spend the extra bucks and get the faster mac portable possible.