I routinely switch between a Dell, an Acer and a Macbook Pro and, quite frankly, they all work for me. What the Acer lacks in display and keyboard it makes up for in weight (it's one of those cheap "Windows Cloudbooks", now with Fedora 26 and extra RAM, very couch-friendly) and battery life. What the Dell (now with Ubuntu 17.04, most of the time attached to a big screen, a Unicomp PC122 keyboard and a reasonable mouse) lacks in display quality, charm and weight, it offers in versatility (sometimes the optical drive is handy after all) and the Macbook Pro is very good, but HFS+ is the crappiest filesystem I've used in over a decade (even NTFS is better). Build quality is unrivalled, however and the newer models maintain that tradition (even if the keyboard takes some time getting used to).
The question is if we need to care about what is used inside. Actually I feel that when there is at least 4 GB RAM (better more) then I can do anything. I didn't cared about computing power for many years and I'm software developer who runs a lot of things during development. That's why I care about how it's pleasant to use instead of technical details. :-)
4 gigs is a bit constrained for me - browsers these days take up a lot of memory. Processing power is also a nice to have since few things are more distracting than sluggish operations. If my tests run for 10 minutes the odds of my mind wandering elsewhere increase.
True. Personally I run only unit tests or tests which do something with my code and the hard work of running all kind of tests I keep for server. Well, all the hard work I do at some server, at least home. Maybe that's why I stopped thinking about that and want notebook which just work out of the box.
