I recently built a new computer (and by recently I mean sept. of last year). I
built it because my laptop was getting old. It was a first generation MacBook,
upgraded slightly to have 2GB ram and a 500GB hard drive. It’s decent for the
vast majority of stuff I do, and I still use it every Saturday to code python or
PHP on, but I wanted something little more powerful for my day to day work.
And I must say – it’s nice to have a powerful computer.
I think most people really don’t need a super powerful computer. For doing
simple tasks an massive desktop is overkill. However, for coding, I think it’s
really needed.
I think the biggest reason it’s needed is for IDEs and virtulization. Having
plenty of juice to run Microsoft’s latest power hogging visual studio, or run
several operating systems at once is really something that’s not just nice, but
almost needed.
All this power didn’t really cost me that much money. for a little over a grand,
the same price as a nice laptop, it’s easy to build a custom computer with
crazily overclocked 6gb triple channel kits, i7 processors, etc. Then just drop
some Linux on there and you’re all set ;)