In the past I have been content with hardware which is several years old. One advantage with slower machines is that benchmarking becomes easier, such that any

In the past I have been content with hardware which is several years old. One advantage with slower machines is that benchmarking becomes easier, such that any slow operations are really obvious at the development stage. The other advantage is that customers are also often using similarly aged hardware. Older hardware forces you to make your algorithms efficient, rather than relying upon faster machines to hide the bloat. In my case I was also often developing for embedded target hardware which was a good deal slower than a typical PC, so older PCs were more realistic for testing. The advantage of always being on the latest hardware is if you're developing large software systems which take a long time to compile, or if you're doing something which fundamentally requires significant number crunching - such as games or computational chemistry.