There are certainly things I can do on my new laptop that was a major hassle on the old one, but web browsing, Python development and day to day sys admin stuff was perfectly fine on the old machine.
For me it's all about the screen, an 11 year old ThinkPad most certainly have a terrible screen (it might not, but most do). Getting a clear hi-dpi monitor is more important than having the latest CPU, GPU or 32GB of RAM, at least for my needs.
I have to disable third party JavaScript, and I have to be careful what software I install, but I love this machine.
I will probably upgrade to an M1/M2 for my next machine, but it’s because of software not hardware. The software, after 10 years, is finally starting to be bloated enough that I feel like I might need more soon.
* No fan control out of the box, so CPU overheats after a new minutes. Fixed by installing a 3rd party fan control package.
* Broken sleep. Always wakes up 2-3 seconds after putting to sleep. Fixed by a series of hacks to disable the keyboard and lid while sleeping. Only the Power button is able to wake it up now.
* Display brightness setting lost after sleep. Always wakes up at 100%.
* Webcam does not work. There is no compatible driver from what I understand.
* Two-finger scroll is awful on Linux, compared to the buttery smooth scroll of MacOS.
* Poor battery life compared to MacOS, I estimate about 25% less.
* It can be tricky to figure out how the Mac keys are mapped to normal Linux keys: Alt, Option, Command. Also tricky to figure out how to remap them so that they are more usable on Linux.
Seriously, going back from a performant arm64 to x86 feels like going back to the POWER architecture all over again. Big bloated chips where every little computation generates a lot of heat and you need big fans to dissipate all of it.
I wish I could do the same, although in the lower end, with my Raspberry Pi 4. Sadly, those laptop cases for the RPi are too expensive, if you include shipping, to justify them.