If you are not doing gaming, there are still things that can make them obsolete. Driving big screens (like multiple 4k screens), hardware acceleration for video

If you are not doing gaming, there are still things that can make them obsolete. Driving big screens (like multiple 4k screens), hardware acceleration for video playback (hevc/av1 is on recent models only, you need hardware acceleration particularly for 4k playback). Also for laptops that actually travel, TPM is a bit of a must to me. It's bad enough if your laptop is lost or stolen, it's a lot worse if your private data is freely accessible to anyone who finds it. TPM wasn't standard on laptops. Otherwise agree, my main work computer remains a i7-6700k, plenty of power for anything I don't run on a server, plus low idle usage. Never needed more than 64GB RAM. I have no use for PCIe 4 or 5 speed (any nvme speed over 2GB/s is kind of wasted on me). [edit] and watch the battery. I had batteries starting to swell after 4-5y on many laptops. You might even want to replace it preventively and while you can still find the model.