> I'm thinking of buying a 5-year-old Dell i7 laptop, which will mostly give me the same speed as the latest model. Heck, no. Moore's law applies to the doubl

> I'm thinking of buying a 5-year-old Dell i7 laptop, which will mostly give me the same speed as the latest model. Heck, no. Moore's law applies to the doubling of transistors. But efficiency gains are still being had every year. An i7 mobile chip released 5 years ago would likely be the i7-8750H (high performance). An intel chip released recently would be the 'Raptor Lake' generation - let's say i7-13650HX (also high performance). The i7-13650HX is at least 50-80% faster (single-core) and over 100% faster in multi-core. While it is true that an i7 from 5 years ago is probably sufficient for basic tasks, RAM+SSD is perhaps more important than raw CPU performance than anything else these days. If you have at least 8 cores, you'll probably have a good time.