There's definitely a sort of "keeping up with the Joneses" that goes on in technical fields with regard to hardware. I do all my personal projects on a 2013 model Ultrabook. Sure it's underpowered, but not for editing text, compiling small codebases, or building CRUD WebApps. If I need to do some derp learning, I can just spin up a cloud instance. There are certainly productive tasks that benefit greatly from newer hardware (video editing, compiling the Linux kernel, launching a single instance of the Android Studio emulator), but most of this hardware capacity is probably for gaming and, like many people, I'm not much of a gamer.