100F ambient temps are high unless you live in the Sahara or have no AC.
I guess all the offices that previously used 3010s for CAD work made bad buying decisions then?
If you don't know what type of work people do, then don't make stuff up. Most people are taxing business systems or else businesses wouldn't spend the money on them.
Yeah, cloud requires no resources hence why hardware needs to be upgraded along with the browser--todays browsers typically use more system resources than any other application. And the developers know this so more bloat, bloat, bloat, which will drive even more hardware upgrades.
There's nothing magical about gaming workload--the gamerz need to feel specialz, but they're not. It's nothing more intense than any other workload that hits max utilization. And the only business systems that have a gpu are those that use one, so they're going to be loaded as well.
Unless the systems were stress-tested that way, you were pushing them in an undesigned work space, probably in an untested orientation.
Yep, everyone is moving to the 'kiosk' model as it makes management a lot easier and you can use thin clients. But then again, all the software bloat is making that hard to do, and sometimes dedicated hardware like usb connected devices makes things easier.
Labs are more about multi-tasking ime--you can do 3-4 things at a time if you have 3-4 systems.
I don't recall ambient temperatures being part of the discussion, but feel free to read back to what that was answering.
As I mentioned, software testing lab that I managed from 2010 to 2015. Your definition of lab ignores what the lab I ran was for. Which was testing application installations for everything used in the company. Not testing our own software development, though that certainly happened. No multitasking at all, each system was loaded up with a new version of whatever it was, documented, automated, and put on to a distribution server, and the test system wiped back to stock. Everyone ordered software through a web portal. Honestly, I tortured those things drives and some of them did die. And I will say Dell certainly won out over the Lenovo, mostly power supply failures on those things.
I do know what type of work people do. And in many cases, helped set them up to do it. Was for a fortune 500 that had about 60,000 systems. A small percentage were desktops fulfilling the roles previously mentioned. Majority of end users were issued laptops. Engineers were issued either a mobile workstation (starting in 2014, before that we didn't really have that, lots of complaints) or a full blown workstation. Earliest I recall were Dell Xeon towers, then dual socket Lenovo (6 core I think, late entry LGA1366), then Dell Precision dual socket systems. Most only had a single 8-core CPU, but we did offer a dual 12 core for the heavy users. Graphics cards were always Quadro 4000 series, whatever was latest at time of purchase. And for a few lucky users at the time, Tesla accelerators.
If wherever you have been didn't have the budget for that, not my fault. Not theirs either, if they were stuck running complex applications on quad cores or worse, I feel sad. Time is money, and a company throwing a few thousand dollars at someone they are paying 100k a year to, is worth it in efficiency. Just have to get it past the bean counters.
And to reiterate again, most of the users of said laptops, and ESPECIALLY desktops at that company used external applications. So the only thing they were typically running was outlook, office, a browser, and antivirus suites, and other background things. I will agree that modern browsers use more system memory then they used to, but CPU usage, typically fairly low unless they are abusing it by leaving everything open.
I think you are also discounting that people don't always get to use modern applications. Some of the stuff they were running was built in the 90s. Heck we still had terminal emulators for accessing an actual mainframe (virtualized itself). Let me tell you those systems didn't do anything. We literally could have gotten Wyse terminals and they would have been just as effective, if it weren't for email. The entire parts and warranty system ran that way.
After 2015 I was put in charge of our license management systems (after helping to set it up), which produced very interesting metrics and we could see how often applications were used. And yes, when I say the majority of users, I really do mean it. Across all those systems we could track live what they were running, filter by device type, all of that stuff. And we did, regularly, to produce reports. We started analyzing software that we were paying for that sat idle for months at a time, reduced license allocations, or stopped renewing so many. We are talking about 5000 authorized applications and another 3 or 4 thousand that people managed to get ahold of. Enforcement wasn't that strict as long as we had the licenses covered and they weren't pirating or playing games. Did find the occasional WoW install or emulator. Call of Duty MW once (would love to have seen how that played on integrated graphics actually)
Never got to the point of targeting people who didn't need high end systems, we really only had about five options. Tablet, Ultrabook, Mobile Workstation, Desktop, Workstation or a fully loaded Workstation, and Toughbooks for field engineers and technicians.
I don't know how else to convince you that Optiplex aren't an amazing system. They work, and if you applied the same workload to a high end gaming rig, I think the gaming rig would outlast it. Mix of experience between my own personal rigs and those I have used as a professional. We went through three major hardware generations while I was there, two brands, and several in between models.