Developers forced to maintain productivity on outdated Intel Mac hardware with incompatible tooling

Developers stuck using 2018 Intel Macs face significant friction when setting up modern development environments, as many tools and dependencies have migrated to ARM/Apple Silicon optimization. They struggle with compatibility issues, slow performance, and unclear guidance on whether their setup will actually work for current development tasks, forcing them to either accept degraded productivity or invest in new hardware they may not have budgeted for.