After being stuck with a really, really bad laptop for the past 4 years, I can't disagree more whole-heartedly. I wouldn't wish that experience on my worst enemy, heh.
Though I wish more time was spent on some tools to make them more memory efficient(I'm looking at you, scala and friends), that's just not how it is today. I just bought a new laptop with 32 gigs of ram, and hopefully that is future-proof for the next few years.
A bit late reply.. but the laptop was just the cheapest laptop I could buy before starting Uni, roughly 4 years ago. I just got my new laptop a couple of days ago, and the difference is incredible.
The other guy that replied to your comment is basically right. My old laptop had a measly 4GB of RAM, and opening multiple tabs in Chrome for documentation, running an editor, some development tools like REPLs etc, and I'd basically be out of RAM. I would literally listen to music on my phone because spotify consumed too much of my precious RAM, and I had to kill off tabs that I hadn't used for a while like it was Survivor, in order to keep my laptop from start swapping(which means everything grinds to a halt).
I even run a very minimalistic window manager and don't use IDEs like IntelliJ or anything.
Not OP, but I had a similar experience. Low end development machines suck because they put the developer in a worse position than the end-user, not an equal one. Modern dev tools, plus common side-utilities like slack/spotify/skype, and accessories like Insomnia, tend to use a lot of memory and cpu. It makes the development experience terrible, and that affects your output. Developing and designing is going to be ~90% of your time spent on a dev box, actually running the dang thing won't take long at all.
A better solution would be for testing, particularly UAT, to be done inside resource-constrained VM's, instead.
Though I wish more time was spent on some tools to make them more memory efficient(I'm looking at you, scala and friends), that's just not how it is today. I just bought a new laptop with 32 gigs of ram, and hopefully that is future-proof for the next few years.