Baloney. I've seen tons of developers claim they need top-of-the-line everything, even if after some point it has no improvement on their productivity. And why not? I don't blame them, I'd want the "256 GB RAM, 36 CPU" beast the other commenter mentioned, too, even if I didn't need it.

I'm not at all saying this has to be an adversarial conversation. But, as people who like to call ourselves software "engineers", I don't at all understand the pushback to at least offering some sort of analytical justification when asking a business to spend gobs of money.