On my last team, we would do QA on devices that ranged from “decade old + notoriously buggy implementation” to “new hotness, not even available to consumers yet

On my last team, we would do QA on devices that ranged from “decade old + notoriously buggy implementation” to “new hotness, not even available to consumers yet”. The latest greatest stuff was more useful so the mfgs could understand what wasn’t done right there, but the old stuff is where our SDK team found the most value — if it ran fine there, it was pretty much guaranteed to be awesome everywhere else. Faster devices would just mask things like frame drop / memory leaks, but those good old low-end old devices were great for detecting problems and perf regressions. An anecdote that has long stuck with me from a bicycle mechanic back in the rust belt: ~“Anyone can make new stuff work well, but not many folks still have the patience and expertise to really make the older stuff shine, but it can and it does with a bit of care.” For work, I upgraded from an 8th Gen Intel 6-Core i9 laptop with 32GB@2400mhz and a 1050ti to a 5950x / RTX 3090 / 32GB@3600mhz with tight timings and it’s very noticeably faster for general desktop usage and development.