Developers making desktop applications should be made to use anemic ~10 year old computers so they know what their application will feel like to common people. Builds can be done on a headless server with plentiful ram; the requirements of the build environment needn't factor into what computer a programmer is given to test their work.
Every performance problem was obvious. Every fix was a clear improvement. And when things were acceptable there, the app absolutely screamed on modern phones. We had startup times faster than Android's launch animation with a little bit of care. Our users loved it.
The equivalent for web development would be to set the network throttling (two clicks in the Chrome DevTools) to the 3G preset, packet drops and all
It’s too bad that perfectly serviceable machines like that are being relegated to closets and trashcans due to sheer inefficiency of modern software.
Thinkpad X200, I'm betting. Lovely machines until you open Firefox.