Just Why do Web Designers Access so much Hardware?

The other day the following Meme crossed my viewing on a article linked from Google Plus.

It got me thinking of just how often, as a Web Designer, we are asked about why we have so much computer hardware when we can code in pretty much any text editor and Web Sites can be viewed in pretty much any browser.

The fact is, this is one of those "Answer is in the question" style questions. You see, as seen in the table below, different platforms each can run different browsers, they also have their own unique hardware setups and not every user runs things like JavaScript or Flash.  This leads to a bit of fun for a Designer, as we need to be able to produce code that potentially could be accessed by any of these situations.  

The solution to producing code that plays nice with everything can be handled in a few ways, one option would be to constantly have to install or delete plugins, and have machines that can boot into multiple Operating systems in order to test the design with minimal hardware.  

The other option would be to keep Multiple configurations of machines accessible with different operating system, hardware and plug in configurations so that the Website that still needs to be able to access something like a Windows XP running Internet Explorer 6 configuration (don't laugh there are offices that to this day still run this configuration, usually due to needing to access legacy programs in their work environment ), can be tested for compatibility and re-coded with redundant code that only is picked up by this configuration.

So why do us Web Designers have so much Computer Hardware? The Answer is because Our Programming language has a robust collection of platforms to deliver Our work to you the consumer