Every developer would like and enjoy more memory. But if you're developing applications for normal folks, it is very important that you experience what life is like on a more limited machine.
That is why, more often than not, I've deliberately worked with hardware that was a generation or two behind the latest and greatest. Yes, it is a PITA. Yes, I'd enjoy the bright and shiny. But it keeps me honest about what is going to work in the wild.
There's definitely some truth to that, but I think you'd be better off switching to an older machine (or deliberately taking out RAM/underclocking the CPU) occasionally. The productivity gains from working with decent hardware are worth it.
You really need 2 computers: one development machine that is the latest and greatest (incl. Intel SSD), and one old slow grandmom computer that shows how slow the 1/4 slowest customer computers are.
You can't combine it into a single computer, because even if it is only 80% of the latest and greatest, it is still way faster than grandmom, thus not representative of your customer base.
The best way to find out how a normal person drives a car is to put a normal person in the drivers seat. Watching usertesting.com videos has shown me how cluttered and slow a normal person's computer can be. It also showed me the interesting ways those people interact with their clunkers.
Instead of having a second crippled computer for testing, I would rather use tools like Charles (http://www.charlesproxy.com/) to cripple my computer in a tweakable and consistent way.
This way I can develop, optimize for certain controlled conditions on the same machine, and verify my optimizations with real people.
Still not slow enough - you'll only be using the second computer for testing. In real life, not only will it be underpowered, it will be running lots of software stealing performance from your app. And don't forget the full disk virus scan at boot.
How about a compromise; develop on shiny fast box, test on the generation or two behind box. Personally, I'm like the GP, I don't feel like my older computer (Athlon XP 1800, bought in 2002) is significantly slower for things that I program. The only slowness are flash movies, but I'm not a flash developer.
I hear what you're saying, but I'd personally rather work more quickly than experience my users' pain. Most of my users won't have a 24" monitor either, but it's worth every penny.
Best choice was to get the 16gb of ram in my Mac Pro. It's epic working with that kind of hardware behind you. I'm running a Windows VM, all my servers are up constantly, dozen programs, etc. And still have 4.25 gb free for the sweet sweet caching.
Hear, Hear! Also went to 20Gb (up from 8Gb) on the Mac Pro in the summer. Best 300$ I ever spent on hardware upgrades. Never close apps anymore, and never experience a swapstorm anymore.
Only one very, very big drawback: you'll want that much RAM in every system you use afterwards. I guarantee it: I just put back the screws on my laptop 10 minutes ago ;-)
Dang and I thought the 3GB I have on my P4 3Ghz desktop circa 2005 was awesome </sarcasm>. Although I can't complain, I can still run the latest Ubuntu, an XP VM for Outlook and the occasional Word doc, Eclipse and a memory hungry Weblogic/ATG setup. free -m reports I'm only using just over half of that 3GB so I'm doing pretty good. To be on a MacPro with 20GB of RAM...sigh...
Well, since the speed of a SRAM cache depends mostly on it's size, I predict that craze to die pretty much instantly when they grow big enough that pipelining cannot mask the increased latency anymore and performance begins to suffer.
I should stop to continue to live with 2GB I guess. can I install any kind of DDR2 SDRAM in my macbook, right? I hope I don't need to get super overpriced Apple RAM.
I just found out that the old macbook pros can take 6GB of ram. The late 2007 and 2008 pre unibody models. So if you're going to order some, might as well order the best.
Every developer who creates desktop apps should work with a rather low spec machine for a while, maybe even for a whole day per week.
Moore's law yadda yadda, but while it's great that we don't have to include inline assembly anymore, some of the waste we're seeing currently is just abysmal.
That is why, more often than not, I've deliberately worked with hardware that was a generation or two behind the latest and greatest. Yes, it is a PITA. Yes, I'd enjoy the bright and shiny. But it keeps me honest about what is going to work in the wild.