Different budgets, different departments, different people. In smaller or more nimble companies you or rather your line manager can influence hardware budget a

Different budgets, different departments, different people. In smaller or more nimble companies you or rather your line manager can influence hardware budget as an offset of your salary v productivity. Also in some larger organisations where departments/teams are more autonomous and have more slack your manager may be able to influence that. But in many large organisations, those who decides what standardised underpowered hardware you shall have may never have even met your line manager and they can not influence that policy. I have once worked with a client that handed out a completely hamstrung laptops with barely any memory and slow disks to all contractors. Project builds would take 30 minutes or more, and I'd watch paint dry by reading slashdot(a long time ago), jousting on chairs in the corridor etc... Plus more time lost as you don't realise instantly when the build has finished and the time to reload all the context back into your own brain's memory... The difference in cost between a top spec machine and the one they handed out was less than the invoice cost of the lost productivity in a day or two. I was there for two years... Granted after a while I did get better and better machines but never good. Though I no longer really work for clients that do that, and my last few contracts have been BYOD which is fine by me. As long as they provide a quality external monitor and the sit-stand desk then I'll bring my own macbook.