I used to do in-house development at a shop that had a great policy on that front: Developer machines were always a generation behind the workstations of people who would be using the software they write.
And a strong culture of belief that, if a developer couldn't get something working well enough in that kind of environment, then that should be taken as a reflection on basically anything but the developer workstation. Inefficient code, excessive memory usage, just plain trying to do too much, bloat, whatever.
But I realize that's a hard thing to sell. A lot of developers don't really appreciate being reminded who works for who.
And a strong culture of belief that, if a developer couldn't get something working well enough in that kind of environment, then that should be taken as a reflection on basically anything but the developer workstation. Inefficient code, excessive memory usage, just plain trying to do too much, bloat, whatever.
But I realize that's a hard thing to sell. A lot of developers don't really appreciate being reminded who works for who.