[batoure]

Yeah there is a fascinating income bias at play there. Think about it this way, if you are an engineer and you make over 75k a year gross you are in the top 15% of wage earners in the united states, if you make over 100k you are in the top 10% of wage earners.

So if you are in one of those brackets chances are your company is spending a good chunk of change on you and doesn't mind springing for a nice laptop to keep you happy. But from the other angle there are some 350 million people working in this country who aren't in that space. and considering that something like 76 to 80% of Americans own a PC/Mac that leaves a good chunk of people who lead a significantly different existence than most engineers.

[niels_olson]

Would developers write better software if they had to write on slower, older machines with less memory and storage?

[batoure]

I think the machine that they design on isn't nearly as important as the machine that they have in their head as designing for.

When testing the early OS and apps for the iphone apple purposely cobbled together a machine that was crippled (performance wise) to be representative of how the end product would run from a user experience perspective.

http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacke...

[rwallace]

No. They would write the kind of software we used to write back in the days when all computers are like that and we traded away everything else for machine efficiency because we had no choice: clumsy, feature impoverished, riddled with arbitrary limits that trip you up at the worst possible moment, fundamentally insecure, hard to use and generally crap.