Station?
I use laptops because they offer the versatility to go anywhere. I rarely sit in the same place for more than an hour or two a day if I'm not at the office, which is most of the time. So let us dispel that notion right away. I had a standing desk, but my wife uses it most days. I could dock on her in-office days, and may try to do so more this year. I like additional screen real estate, but will not clamor for it as I no longer work the same way I used to, spending more time doing things that are not writing code. When I am at the office, or do dock, I usually have two additional screens (I do not close my laptop lid, I prefer the keyboard on the device itself) of 24" to 27", and if possible, one screen is oriented vertically to offer that aspect ratio when prudent.
Specs
Honestly if you aren't gaming, why do you care? My M1 Macbook Air is fantastic. An M2 Air with 16 GB of RAM would probably last me at least five years. What's important is that I can work quickly and efficiently. I am not waiting for apps to start on my laptop. I can just "do" and never have to "plan" or "wait" for the laptop to be ready. Booting from full off takes under 10 seconds. Do I wish it had more than 2 Thunderbolt ports? Yes, 4, like my Intel i9 16" Macbook Pro would be nice, but it's ok. If you have $1,500 to buy a rig, I'd recommend an M2 Air with 16 GB as the best thing you can get, if you aren't gaming. And if you are, just buy a completely separate $750 - $950 gaming laptop. Anything with some recent NVidia card will cover most games made until 2019.
Specs Revisited
With all the AI stuff, I had to upgrade. An M1 Air with 8GB of RAM was not going to cut it. I run Ollama locally and it could not run anything over nine billion parameters without crashing. So I went on ebay and bought an M2 Max Macbook Pro with a 1 TB disk and 64 GB of RAM. Now I can run a 50 billion parameter model easily. Or many smaller models. I am documenting a bit about it here.
Got Any Cheese?
I am very accustomed to the Magic Trackpad which has been standard equipment on all the Macbooks I have ever owned and used. But I will say that having a mouse sometimes has been useful, and I would be missing something if I did not have the option to use that especially when docked at a desk. All of the setups at the office have a dock with one of the monitors and a bluetooth mouse. The power and another monitor cable round out the connections when I sit down.
Software Management
There is a lot of discussion these days about this, but for my money, Brew is still the best thing you can get for any Mac. There's Chocolatey or WinGet for Windows, and Linux has yum or apt (or pacman) depending on your flavor. Sure, macports might have a few things, and people are moving towards Nix (or even NixOS) but overall, I cannot see why you would not go with the battle-tested Brew. First thing I install every time is Brew. The next thing is XCode. Sure, you could just install the command line tools (xcode-select --install) but why not just install the whole thing? Now you can build iOS apps and run iPhone emulators, and while those aren't super useful to many people, you never know when it will come in handy. So get those two running before doing anything else.
Next - Comms
Not much to say here - you can install these from brew, which is nice. Slack, Discord, Signal, Zoom, Teams, and Skype. All of these have Brew casks (although Teams is called microsoft-teams) and then you are ready to talk to just about anyone on any platform
Interwebs
Macs ship with Safari. Kind of like how Windows ships with Edge. I happen to like Safari a lot, and it works well with my other Apple devices which all run Safari (or at least WebKit if I'm browsing on my watch...what? You didn't know you could browse the internet on your watch? Well you can, go give it a try). But if you want Chrome (and chrome-cli) or Firefox, you can get those from Brew. I sometimes find this helpful for duplicate sessions when private windows are annoying. Plus FireFox syncs with my Meta Quest 2.
Terminal Velocity
Zsh has been the default MacOS shell for a while now, and if you pair this with Robert Russell's Oh-My-Zsh, you have an amazing terminal environment at your disposal. Then, if you haven't thought about it yet, the stock Terminal app in MacOS is absolute trash. I have tried Hyper and Kitty but keep coming back to iTerm as a very powerful terminal replacement, get it from Brew. The only things to customize immediately are infinite scrollback buffer, no promps, and a preset to open a full-screen fully-opaque terminal on launch (oh, and maybe the command jumps, if you're used to the old ways)
Kubernetes and Local Containers
If you're going to be doing work on Kubernetes, you'll want k9s and openlens from brew. OpenLens might need a plugin for pod execs, so be sure to grab that from here. Now you can poke around any cluster very easily. You should also install some kind of local management software, and this is where things get hairy. You can install docker from brew, but you can also install rancher or podman-desktop (and also minikube) so you can work locally. I still use Docker Desktop personally, but I imagine I'd be just fine if I swapped to one of the other two options and installed minikube to avoid licensing issues that can crop up with Docker Desktop for Mac.
Code
Next thing you'll need is an IDE - and brew has visual-studio-code. Possibly the best IDE I've ever used. I will write a whole post just about the configuration, extensions, and power of this free Microsoft offering. Sometimes, you don't need a full IDE though so I also install vim from brew. I am not here for an evangelical fight over vim vs emacs, if you prefer emacs, get that (or Doom Emacs if you are feeling frisky). Just don't use nonsense like nano or gedit or pico.
The Rest
gnuutils, gh, python, pyenv, pipx, and dozens of other applications. I will eventually link to a cleaned up repo I clone to any new machine to get it going.