I'm a hacker. I just don't hack on computers, so I'd rather not have to waste time hacking the computer for me to do other hacking on.

I find it weirder that people whining about that are usually not impaired by it for their dayjobs? I hear people shouting about wanting gpus and multicores and 16 gb and then that they are doing React dev on it as professional. What do you need that monster for when doing that dev? When I do 3d game dev, ML or image processing/recog I need something heavy (although... I really only need that locally for the first from that list). The rest I can do on mostly anything after 2009... Including React dev.

For me (closer to react guy), I want an SSD and plenty of ram... a high end core i5 with integrated gpu will do... but in many corp environments there are only a handful of build options, so you get the uber machine or 8gb ram with spinning rust drive.

I mean, I can "get by" on anything - an iPod Touch that runs Emacs 23, just to pick an example off my desk. When the chips are down, I'll get the job done with it. When the chips aren't down, and I have something more closely approaching my druthers with regard to the tools I use, I'm not going to go for the iPod.