As others have pointed out this is far from being accurate. You most definitely don't need awesome hardware to learn how to code. In fact I wasn't sure if that quote about quitting over bigger monitors is serious or not but after following the linked article it seems to be.

I also wrote an article about how bad hardware actually made me a better programmer: http://www.randomshouting.com/2010/12/14/Scarce-hardware-as-.... Not trying to spam my articles or anything, I just feel like it's an interesting contrast to this article.