For many use cases there's really very little need for the latest and greatest. Understandable if you're a gamer, working in VR or heavy graphics, perhaps some

For many use cases there's really very little need for the latest and greatest. Understandable if you're a gamer, working in VR or heavy graphics, perhaps something with a decent GPU and a not-too-old CPU will be helpful. Most of my work is web dev, plenty of webpack, browser tabs, PHPStorm & IDEA Ultimate doing their thing on a T-class 4th generation Intel CPU. It could be faster, sure, but I'm more often waiting for my brain than the machine. SSD & plenty of RAM helps a ton more than a fast CPU for this use case. I do find it useful to dogfood on older devices: if what I'm working on is slow for me, it may well be slow for a reasonable proportion of its users, too.