I worked for a huge company in their IT dept. We tried to convince our management to upgrade all the development machines using some of the arguments already me

I worked for a huge company in their IT dept. We tried to convince our management to upgrade all the development machines using some of the arguments already mentioned in this thread. They did not want to believe that a hardware refresh would actually improve productivity ("show us the ROI"). A couple of us decided to build a tool to gather some metrics on how long it took to build and deploy our app on localhost (if you're interested see http://lopb.org http://lopb.org). We then compared results before and after a simple RAM upgrade on a few machines. We were able to show hard numbers to support the claim that better, faster hardware would save time waiting for build & deploy to complete. Although building in less time did lead to happier developers, it did not lead to more features getting built in the given time frame. We did eventually all get RAM upgrades at least, but the development process and technology stack we were using were the real time sucks that we could not fix with better hardware.