PyCharm works fine on my 2013 Macbook Air 11" (1,3GhZ i5 with 4GB RAM and a rather slow 128GB SSD).

I wouldn't call that a low powered machine. I started learning to program with a Gateway Netbook (sub 1ghz single core processor with 1gb ram) just a few years ago. It was so painfully slow to load anything other than a REPL and Vim (with no plugins - I tried compiling YouCompleteMe but all 3 times the machine ran out of memory). That's what I stuck with, and I'm glad :D

I'd say it's an average powered machine, at best.

I wouldn't have bought an i5 with 4 GB of RAM and 128 SSD for my sw development job in 2013. I had a Core Duo 2 with that much RAM from 2006 at the time (well past its end of life). That was still pretty ok CPU wise but the memory became really tight. I could make it faster with a SSD but it wasn't worth it.

I bought an i7, 16 GB (up to 32 GB) laptop at the beginning of 2014, with a 750 HDD that I swapped with a 1 TB SSD an year later.

The Air is my private machine and I bought for size/form factor (aka travel).

I had a MacBook Pro 15" (far better spec'd) at the time, but left it at home/work due to size and weight. The 11" Air fits "everywhere" and still has a full size keyboard and a good trackpad.

My Late 2013 MacBook Pro (bought early 2014) is a 2,3GhZ i7, 16GB memory and 500GB SSD. Compiling, VirtualBox/Parallels and Docker is less painful, but 99% of the time the old 11" Air is good enough.

Yeah, definitely not high powered, I just wanted to highlight that it's also not low powered compared to what others may be try to use PyCharm on, such as myself

It was considered slow 4 years ago, but I bought it for the form factor (and still use it daily).

PyCharm, Django and PostgreSQL runs ok, but it's too slow for docker.

Anything slower is useless for (modern) development and if you're a student on a budget there's loads of used or refurbished PCs on ebay costing $100 or even less.

A <$250 laptop purchased today is more powerful than the Air mentioned above. I think it's a reasonable baseline. It's still possible to get a 2GB laptop today, but it's becoming more rare, and the CPUs are very much more powerful than your old netbook.

Fair point. Most of my experience goes back to the "pre-macbook" stage of my life where I was running windows 7 on whatever hunk-of-junk laptop I could afford in college.

I have a lot of respect for the iterative improvements they make on all their products (I've use nearly all of them).