It has nothing todo with speed, but finding bug's.
>I always recommend developers to get the cheapest possible laptop for testing.
Yeah that is stupid, until you are the developer of that Laptop, or your dev's have too much time, take trusty Hardware and Down-clock it if you need to (you don't want to debug cheap hardware).
If you want to find bugs in your code that arise from assumptions about machine architecture, you can use emulators. You don't need an ancient MIPS machine for that, unless you want to find bugs on code that supports long obsolete hardware. And you can emulate architectures far weirder than MIPS with that.
And you should test on slow and unreliable hardware. You'd be surprised, for instance, how frequently servers fail to boot because the BMC ignored your instructions.
>from assumptions about machine architecture, you can use emulators
That is exactly NOT true, since there is no 100% correct emulation around, think of x64 emulation with integrated Meltdown, if you don't know about meltdown your emulation has no implementation for it.
Look you made a perfect counterargument, using unreliable hardware...with your words you could just test it with unreliable emulation ;)
>unreliable hardware... how frequently servers
Wait...server's and unreliable do not match together...and then the BMC argument..sound's bit crazy to me.
>I always recommend developers to get the cheapest possible laptop for testing.
Yeah that is stupid, until you are the developer of that Laptop, or your dev's have too much time, take trusty Hardware and Down-clock it if you need to (you don't want to debug cheap hardware).