I Test Everything on an 8-Year-Old MacBook Air. Here's What That Forces You to Get Right.

Every screenshot in my dev.to posts has the same caption: "All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air." That's not a disclaimer. It's a design constraint. The machine 2017 MacBook Air. 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5. 8GB RAM. No discrete GPU. No Apple Silicon neural engine. The slowest Mac you could reasonably use in 2026. This is my primary development and testing machine. What it breaks immediately Anything that renders everything at once. Loading a 200-page PDF and rendering all pages to imag