If you ask me, all web devs should be forced to work on 4 Gb machines.

This way you'll be able to run more than one "web app" at the same time on your devices.

Should be forced to Test on a 4gb machine.

A few years ago, I had two computers on my desk, my beefy dev with double screens and some good specs for the time and my test machine which was the standard given to every non dev, with a 1024x768 screen.

I couldn't say to the boss that the code was ready until I tested it on that machine, which was sometimes eye opening and why a 2Mb HTML page wasn't a good idea.

I agree, but it's nice to be able to run LLMs locally on my laptop. LLMs are actually the only reason I'm looking to upgrade my 2013 hardware.

Hah. When I worked for a very big Just Print Money bank circa 2008, they gave me, a SDE with the Lenovo ThinkPads running Windows with 4GB of RAM and a bonus of Lotus Notes for email. This thing was slower than molasses. Not to mention because we had an offshore team in India. every morning every engineer would begin the day with syncing the Subversion repo. My team was in central US but we had to connect to a proxy in NYC for network traffic inspection. This makes the sync over 45 minutes long. Repeat the same for every SDE, from both sides of the world, and you can guess the amount of time wasted.

I don’t think I would want to work in that environment anymore.

I like to imagine the gaming landscape if developers were forced to work on 5yr old hardware.

That's dumb. You can hardly even buy a machine with 4GB of memory on sale, at any price.

If you are making products that depend on people spending money on them, you generally don't have to care about broke people with 15 year old computers.