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Apparently PHPStorm and Photoshop aren't "text editors" one would imagine.

PhpStorm = Big, Java-based IDE. It's not some simple text editor.

PHP Dev often means some sort of local server running too.

big complex IDEs are almost never compute bound.

compilers are often compute bound (certainly on SSDs).

web servers are almost never compute bound.

You severely underestimate JetBrains IDE.

any IDE that is compute bound should be thrown out, especially for a language that is never compiled.

One has to wonder about the carbon footprint of millions of developers running these monstrous IDEs.

Yeah, but that's a lot of us. Obviously there are some programmers out there doing computation-bound work, but an awful lot of us aren't. If you're doing web stuff or making apps, then basically any computer manufactured in the last 5-8 years is going to be fine. I do iOS side work on a 2012 quad-core Mac Mini. It's totally fine.

It's OK to geek out about hardware, if that's your thing. But it's not really necessary for most people -- even programmers.