James Brickley

I have the first gen. It depends on what you do with a Mac. The 12" MacBook is meant to be used for extreme portability. It sacrifices high CPU based work. As the CoreM CPU heats up it throttles the clock to slow it down and cool off as there is no fan. So that means it is poorly suited to video editing, conversion, 3D rendering, advanced Photoshop processing, running virtual machines, etc. . I have a Mac Pro for the heavy lifting. If you need that kind of power on the road then the 12" MacBook is not for you. Buy another Mac that suits your need. Nobody says you have to buy this model. That's why there is a range of products. 

If you run basic applications such as Office 2016, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Photos, iTunes, etc. it works very fast. The CPU only spikes for short periods of time so does not generate more heat than can be dissipated. 

For programming tasks that don't require extensive compiling or where you can compile on a remote server it works a peach. Much of what I do is over ssh in tmux where the data is actually on a *nix server. But I can do that on an iPad Pro with the Prompt app and sometimes I do exactly that.

The 12" MacBook is a breeze to travel with and its charger can be used to quick charge an iPad Pro 12.9" with USB-C to Lightning cable. So that means carrying one charger. 

The single USB-C port is frequently bashed but seriously I am not plugging stuff into it frequently enough to worry about it. I have a few dongles and rarely use them. Would have been nice to see if USB3.1 Type C Gen2 was added to the newly updated MacBook. It would double data transfer speed. Again not moving data much. I backup wirelessly to networked TimeMachine and data is backed up to Dropbox. I might plugin a USB3 disk now and then or I might connect to a monitor/TV/Projector. 

No Windows PC can be compared unless it runs Linux Desktop perfectly with full on device support. (Mac bridges the gap between Linux and Windows as many Windows apps run on Mac and ALL Linux apps run) Windows is not UNIX. I cannot run my tool chain and workflow on Windows. Yes I know Win10 has a new Linux layer w/bash and I know they are porting SQL Server to Linux. But that just means the shift to Cloud is causing a loss of developers jumping off Azure and not running Windows. The rock star web/cloud developers and DevOps are demanding Mac when hired or they will not take the job. A titanic shift is underway but it won't be noticed until we hit a highly visible tipping point.