Hehe, I was thinking about this recently, and I suspect it's true. I actually spent quite a bit on my current laptop (although, importantly, I optimized for screen resolution, size and weight above sheer performance). Then I looked at my usage patterns.

Which program do I use the most? Easy: Emacs and Firefox. Which I could probably run--just as easily--on virtually any computer imaginable.

Emacs really speaks for itself; "eight megabytes and constantly swapping" is not an insult any more. In the grand scheme of things, Emacs uses essentially no resources.

And Firefox is good for two reasons: it's pretty efficient as is, and I don't visit many heavy websites. Hacker News, StackOverflow, Reddit, Google, hackage, Wikipedia and so on could easily be rendered by even the weakest of computers.

So I could probably get by almost as comfortably on a ten-year-old laptop. The main problem I would have would be with compilers (especially GHC), but I don't compile large packages all that often. The programs I work on myself are never gigantic. So for my own files, especially without optimizations, compile time would not be an issue even on a smaller machine. And if I'm not using Haskell or OCaml, chances are I'm using something like Scheme or Python or JavaScript, which don't even have compile times.

I am definitely sure that I could get by on a significantly weaker computer than somebody with less technical acumen. But would I? No! I love my useless desktop effects, my silly widgets and my 20-second boot. I like my programs opening in seconds. And I certainly enjoy having more computer power than I strictly need.

So while I'm pretty sure I require far less computer resources than most people, I'm still going to get a nicer computer than I strictly have to. Just because I can.

Just an amusing observation I've had about myself.