I don't get this piece. If you're a developer, you should have the best development gears you can afford. Why have it so miserable to make it more of a punishment than a happy environment to work in.
> If you're a developer, you should have the best development gears you can afford.
There's also the school of thought that you should be using the hardware configuration you expect most users will be running and make sure your product runs acceptable on it.
Giving the devs highly powered machines just removes them from what the majority of users will experience. While most people still surf the web with Core 2 Duo machines many webdevs have overpowered i7 rigs with gigabytes of RAM. And that's why so many JavaScript loaded websites are unusable on anything but the latest quadcore i7 systems nowdays.
This might have been true for desktop software development, but not in this case. In the context of mobile apps, it's the testing devices might as well be low-end ones, not the development machines.
> If you're a developer, you should have the best development gears you can afford.
generalization.
This is true if you're doing heavy 3D rendering. For those of us doing anything from web to kernel development, it's almost certainly overkill.
I've been running years behind in hardware for over a decade; my workstation certainly isn't slow, but it doesn't take a lot to run Python interpreters and web servers; Eclipse is pretty heavy, but even a high-end dual core or low-end quad core with a couple gigs of RAM will handle it well.
Having more power than you need to work comfortably isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is in many cases pointless, and unless you're making money hand over fist or using your rig(s) for something else that's intensive (like high end gaming), it's an unnecessary expenditure that just doesn't make much sense. At some point all you're doing is hurting your own bottom line (and that of your company, if you have one).
You can use the extra computation power, DRAM and drive space when you do complex data analysis or run virtualization. I can either run huge data sets or have multiple VMs running to simulate various server configurations and test cases without having additional physical gear. And this is on a beefy commodity laptop that costs less than most Apple gear.
As for spinning up Amazon clusters, that's fine when you don't have to care about company/clients data security. We live in the post NSA revelation world and if you connect from overseas, your security is null and void.
;)
An 2008 Macbook might be sufficiently faster. Good for you.