I recently got an upgrade but, I spent quite a long time working as a professional data scientist and data engineer on a 2013 MacBook with one of those Facebook/email CPUs. Quite happily, too. It was never going to hack it training any deep neural nets, of course. But that is what our data center is for. I wouldn't want that kind of stuff running locally, anyway, for a whole host of reasons. And it turns out that analyzing data in Jupyter or R is can easily be a lighter workload than displaying Facebook ads or doing whatever it is that Google has recently done to Gmail.
I will admit that our front end developers do all have nice high end machines, multiple high-resolution monitors, all the good stuff that Jeff Atwood tells us we should buy for all developers because They Deserve the Best. I attribute our site's sub-par (in my opinion) UX on the Facebook/email CPUs and 13-15" monitors that our users typically have, in part, to the fact that my colleagues' belief that high-end kit is necessary for getting real work done is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's not much intrinsic incentive to worry about user experience when your employer is willing to spend thousands of dollars on insulating you from anything resembling a user experience.
I will admit that our front end developers do all have nice high end machines, multiple high-resolution monitors, all the good stuff that Jeff Atwood tells us we should buy for all developers because They Deserve the Best. I attribute our site's sub-par (in my opinion) UX on the Facebook/email CPUs and 13-15" monitors that our users typically have, in part, to the fact that my colleagues' belief that high-end kit is necessary for getting real work done is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's not much intrinsic incentive to worry about user experience when your employer is willing to spend thousands of dollars on insulating you from anything resembling a user experience.