I think the question needs to be more specific and it's not entirely clear that someone else could answer it for you except in the most general way. Development

I think the question needs to be more specific and it's not entirely clear that someone else could answer it for you except in the most general way. Development system requirements depend heavily on application domain, your tooling and your workflow. For development, you are usually running a lot of stuff in addition to your system. You might want the ability to host multiple copies of your system for integration / regression testing. You might use a heavy IDE. You might be someone who switches between multiple projects. You could be a person who keeps hundreds of tabs open (although it sounds like you are not!). The best choice is whatever you feel is most productive, for you. Conventional reasoning is that the choice which maximises the value of your time is the most powerful system you can afford that meets your portability requirements. If you need to experience the system as if it were on a less powerful machine you can use CPU and memory throttled docker containers or virtual machines. If constraints boost creativity for you, then go for it. Personally I would not mandate weak hardware for everyone on a team, you want to let people keep their own workflows. IMHO a better approach than weak development systems is performance testing in CI on resource constrained targets. This is going to be more consistent over time (as you upgrade your systems) and scales better for teams. You do usually want some test systems which are representative of the minimum hardware spec you expect your users to have.