I only do coding & browsing so maybe I'm a weak example but I find this even with my pretty old Intel laptops these days.
My Skylake one (I think that would be 6 years old now?) is doing absolutely fine. My Broadwell one is starting to feel a little aged but perfectly usable, I wouldn't even _consider_ upgrading it if I was in the bottom 95% of global income.
Compiling is very slow on these, but I think I'd avoid compilation on my laptop even if I had a cutting edge CPU?
Depends. I used to offload almost all compilation tasks, but now I only really do this if it's especially large. If I want to update my NixOS configuration I don't bother offloading it anymore. (NixOS isn't exactly Gentoo or anything, but I do have some overrides that necessitate a decent amount of compilation, mainly dogfooding my merge requests before they get merged/released.)
My Skylake one (I think that would be 6 years old now?) is doing absolutely fine. My Broadwell one is starting to feel a little aged but perfectly usable, I wouldn't even _consider_ upgrading it if I was in the bottom 95% of global income.
Compiling is very slow on these, but I think I'd avoid compilation on my laptop even if I had a cutting edge CPU?