[monk-e-boy]

In one of my first jobs as a coder we had little crappy PCs for development. They were ok, but a bit slow. When I left I wrote a polite email to the CEO pointing out the same thing - lag time x wages per hour x number of people in the team. A week later one of the devs emailed me and said they'd just recieved amazing new machines.

[iwwr]

It's not always clear that faster machines really produce net productivity gains, unless the employee's time is already saturated with work. The net gains may manifest themselves into lower working hours, but the company can't just then start paying employees for 7.5 hours instead of 8 (although it can let go of 5% of the workforce to the same effect).

[Dylanlacey]

But employees can get more done in their 7.5 hours then they could in 8.

Rather, those 7.5 hours are less interrupted by waits, lag, pauses and compiles. Switching from IDE to reference is more seamless, and so the preservation of flow is much more likely.