>If all you're doing is writing PHP/Python/Ruby in vim/emacs and running a local Apache/nginx and possibly a MySQL server then it almost doesn't matter what har

>If all you're doing is writing PHP/Python/Ruby in vim/emacs and running a local Apache/nginx and possibly a MySQL server then it almost doesn't matter what hardware you have... apart from the monitor. OK. If you're developing on a local instance of Apache/nginx sure. But as a professional web developer I usually have a fully virtualized dev environment running. That means, at least one of our app servers, our database server, and possibly a Windows VM (for testing in IE - usually I can save this for when I'm in the office and have all this stuff running on another machine).