I've generally been in this camp, up until last month my primary personal box was a 5-6 year old Chromebook (HP Chromebook 13 G1), which with the recent ability

I've generally been in this camp, up until last month my primary personal box was a 5-6 year old Chromebook (HP Chromebook 13 G1), which with the recent ability to run Linux containers let me do almost everything in my "home" workflow. However, a month ago I got one of those new Macbooks to fill in a few voids the Chromebook and borrowing my wife's laptop couldn't. The biggest being video editing. The main incentive was back in October when I spent ~30 hours editing my kids school concert video. Playing all sorts of tricks to get the machine to be barely useful for editing, etc. That Mac hardware lets me copy the media from my phone or action cam and directly edit it. I don't have to generate optimized media, and it's lightning fast at scrubbing and rendering. Now I'm running into wanting to update my work laptop, which is only a couple years old, because I got 2 4K monitors on end-of-year sale, and the laptop can only drive them at lower resolutions. So, yes, for many use cases older laptops are just great. I felt stupid spending that money on a new laptop, for what is an infrequent use case (videos, slicing 3D files being the big ones). But, what previously, even with my desktop that died, was a painful experience, has now become a joy. That has made it worth the price. Plus, my spend on laptops over the last 7 years, personally, has been around $700. If an old laptop works for you, great! If an old laptop plus some new upgrades works for you, fantastic! But, don't forget that if spending some money can solve a pain point, it might still be a good value.