Yes, they would be motivated to write optimized code rather than a bunch of crap. Their productivity may suffer, unless their tools were also optimized to run

Yes, they would be motivated to write optimized code rather than a bunch of crap. Their productivity may suffer, unless their tools were also optimized to run on these slower devices. I normally write (or test) code in a virtual machine on an older system to make sure I force myself to think about impact to performance.