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

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.