I cannot understand companies who pay developers 90k+ and then make them work on shitty "business desktop" machines that haven't been updated for 5 years or longer.
Sadly this is rather common.
My work machine is better specced than my home machine at my current employer, which is a first. OC'd Core i7, SLI video, SSD OS disk + 10K RPM data disk...I hardly ever wait for the machine to catch up.
Except there was photoshop involved.
And a solitary 15" monitor.
And they required IE8 support (which required running a virtual machine with windows xp).
After I finished my first project there I was gone pretty quickly. Along with almost their entire freelance development team (they had ~6 freelancers and two full time developers). After we left, we heard the VP we reported to was let go..
But we have TWO MONITORS!!! as the recruiter who got me in here pointed out.
Personally, I bring in my MacBook Pro and hook it up to one of my TWO MONITORS!!! because it's a much better environment than the rubbish tower server they gave me.
1GB RAM powerhouses with 5400 RPM disks.
I lobbied hard for 6 months, doing research for them, laying out how little it would cost to buy new machines, and an additional monitor for all the developers, going so far as to do benchmarks of our software on my home machine (consumer-level $1200 Core i7) compared to the work cast-offs.
I quit when it was clear they did not care about the concerns of the developers at all, just cared for milking the sole golden goose.
But managers who did little more than PowerPoint, Outlook and surfing the net got budget to upgrade their laptops to specs that outclassed any machine the engineers had, it was pretty depressing.
We're a medium-sized startup with a rocking VP of engineering, so there's no push to "standardize" on shitty HP or Dell machines, thank god.