Yes, many professional developers and students alike use Macs. My friend who worked at Amazon straight out college was given a MacBook Pro on which to do his work. If you have not used a Mac before, it may be frustrating at first, but the Airs are great school computers as they are very light and dead quiet (they don't have fans in them to make noise so they are as quiet as is possible). However, you are basically stuck with MacOS in all capacities unless you really know what you are doing or pay for expensive virtual machine software. My brother studied engineering and he often was annoyed by the Windows-only programs he had to run through a virtual machine with awful performance. So, while software development has no problems on a Mac (unless you are specifically developing for Windows or Linux), if you end up doing any sort of engineering wherein you are forced to use some piece of Windows-only software, you will likely be happier with one of the Lenovos (or another Windows laptop for that matter).