[ethank]

Shouldn't it be worth it to decrease friction in something you are spending 8-10 hours a day on? Personally I can't stand when I run into the physical/computational limitations of a system I'm on. I also can't stand it when someone on my team complains about this.

A nice computer, a good amount of RAM, good input devices, a good chair and a desk are paltry compared to what you should be paying a great engineer or designer.

Tools don't make the talent, but they sure do make the extraction of talent into product/technology much easier all around.

[latch]

Like I said in another comment, in my opinion, a 2006 (intro of a intel's c2d) computer with 8gigs of ram + an SSD was pretty much the last time your average programmer saw any appreciable gains on the desktop.

Things _have_ moved forward since then, especially if your are multi-thread/core sensitive. For everyone else, even at 8-10hours a day, I'm not sure it'd be considered a great investment for such incremental improvements.

[freeman478]

Unfortunately in some (most ?) big enterprise we are still stuck with Windows XP (so 3.5gigs of RAM) and shitty hard drive that are further killed by the antivirus :(

[ethank]

RAM and i/o will certainly make the biggest difference for the average person or engineer. That and HID's and your display.

My computer before this one at its core was not the latest/greatest Mac Pro, but I had upgraded parts (RAM, video, HD) which made the biggest difference.