When I'm trying to do real work (which is not spending my life on bullshit meetings), I use relatively minimalistic setup that mainly looks like this:
It includes:
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MacBook Pro 14' M2 16 RAM (which is really low if you try to run a couple of docker containers and IDE)
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Magic Keyboard (10 years old, pre touch id era)
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LG 27UL500-W (version 2023), 27 " UHD 4K (cheap, but does the job)
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chair and table from IKEA, also cheap but surprisingly comfortable
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Sony WH1000XM4 (they are kind of okay, especially if you are not an audiophile, a little bit base boosted though)
I'm not a big fan of multiple-screen setups, so most of the time I use the external display with closed laptop.
Software takes a little longer. I try to use version control for my software setup via dotbot in the github repo.
I used to be a big fan of vscode and created a very thin config, dropping all noisy elements
But some time ago vscode became unusable and I decided to try these:
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jetbrains pycharm – still the best for big projects (if you mainly use Python). However it's really heavy and if you try to run this one together with multiple docker containers be ready to say bye bye to your RAM
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cursor – fork of vscode with it's own features and LLM integration. Although the integration is really cool it still feels little bit heavy and buggy, thanks to Electron
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zed – my latest take on code editors. It's fast, has integrations with almost all modern LSPs, feels really good. I can't use it as drop-in replacement for pycharm but the play really nice in pair
I also don't like GUI for terminals and Git so I use good-old terminal emulators. For my whole macbook life I was using ITerm2, but a couple of months ago decided to switch to something modern.
My first try was ghostty (I'm also playing with Zig in my free time) and it was good until I found out about the lack of the searching feature.
Then I tried wezterm and decided to stick with it.
For productivity and routine I use Obsidian (minimum set of plugins and customization), a pomodoro timer (I really don't like almost all existent options since they consume too much memory, probably I will write my own in near future) and Alfred (most for web search).
For security and backups I use 1Password and BackBlaze. They are relatively expensive but I couldn't find anything that gives me the same level of confidence, so it's kinda worth it.