As a software engineer, I insist on giving developers high-end laptops. The reason is very simple: a lot of development environments are very heavy to run, and developers should not waste time on their development tools running slowly. I also don't want developers to disable tools that are meant to keep an eye on the quality of the code. High-end laptops generally serve well for development for up to 5 years.
Developing on high-end laptops should definitely not be an excuse to deliver slow software, and in the teams I work in, we do pay attention to performance. You are right though, a lot of software is a lot slower than it should be and my opinion is that the reason is often developers that lack fairly basic knowledge about data structures, algorithms, databases, latency,... One could say that time pressure on the project could also play a role, but I strongly believe that lack of knowledge plays a much bigger role.
Now, aside from that, also keep in mind that users (or the product owner) become more and more demanding about what software can and should do (deservedly or not). The more a piece of software must do, the more complex the code becomes and the more difficult it becomes to keep it in a good state.
Lastly, in my humble opinion, the lowest range budget laptops are simply not worth buying, even for less demanding users. I think that most users on a low budget would be better off with a second-hand middle or high range laptop for the same price. (I am talking here about laptops that people expect to run Windows on, no experience with Chromebooks.)
> users (or the product owner) become more and more demanding
I disagree. For all my life, customers have been asking for as much as they can imagine. Customers wanted flying cars long before they wanted the latest iPhone.
The thing that changed is that we realised that if we write lower quality software that has more features (useful or not), customers buy that (because they are generally not competent to judge the quality, but they can count the features). So the goal now is to have more features.
> I think that most users on a low budget would be better off with a second-hand
Which is exactly the problem we are talking about: you are pushing for people to get newer hardware. You just say that poorer people should get the equivalent of newer hardware for the poors. But people on a budget would actually be better off if they could keep their hardware longer.
Developing on high-end laptops should definitely not be an excuse to deliver slow software, and in the teams I work in, we do pay attention to performance. You are right though, a lot of software is a lot slower than it should be and my opinion is that the reason is often developers that lack fairly basic knowledge about data structures, algorithms, databases, latency,... One could say that time pressure on the project could also play a role, but I strongly believe that lack of knowledge plays a much bigger role.
Now, aside from that, also keep in mind that users (or the product owner) become more and more demanding about what software can and should do (deservedly or not). The more a piece of software must do, the more complex the code becomes and the more difficult it becomes to keep it in a good state.
Lastly, in my humble opinion, the lowest range budget laptops are simply not worth buying, even for less demanding users. I think that most users on a low budget would be better off with a second-hand middle or high range laptop for the same price. (I am talking here about laptops that people expect to run Windows on, no experience with Chromebooks.)