How much is $500 worth to you in terms of productivity, though? Depends on how much you earn per hour, but for a lot of people, $500 isn't much in the big scheme of things.

For $500 I could put up with some level of annoyance... $500 buys a lot of Linode 512 time.

$500 / (10 hrs/week * 50 weeks) = $1/hr. I'd only worry about it if your hourly rate approaches this.

Alternatively, since we're drawing arbitrary amounts of time from the air, $500 / (10 hrs/week * 1 wk) = $50/hr. Meanwhile I'm paying two months of rent with the money I saved not buying a Macbook.

How much time/money do you save when you don't have to wait for your code to compile before you can leave, or when you don't have to worry about making sure you save before your battery dies? I can spend $1000 on a laptop and work on it with the same constraints as any workstation, or I can put that $500 to several years of Linode and have money left over to type "go build massive_project" then meet my girl for a coffee while it chugs away in the background without a worry.