> buying top of the line laptops and trying to use them longer is never going to be cheaper or better than buying medium grade laptops and upgrading more often.
I think this is much less general than you make it out to be and has an extremely strong dependency on how you use the thing and of your preference. It makes me think of the boot theory.
Personally, for the type of work I do, I rarely need the latest ludicrously fast CPU. But I use it a lot and love to do so comfortably. To me, that means a great screen, a quiet fan, and a nice keyboard and touchpad.
Buying a mediocre computer and changing it more often means you'll always have a mediocre experience. A case in point: at work we have HP Elitebooks. The brand-new 2025 models I see people receive have worse screens and trackpads than my 2013 MBP. Sure, that box was quite a bit pricier even in nominal terms, but it had the same amount of RAM (16 GB) and SSD (512 GB) as these new computers. I'll also grant that the new ones have a faster CPU but the SSDs are somehow absurdly slow. I haven't seen a single one of these machines last more than 10 years fully functional. My mom still uses that MBP.
But the experience is sub-par. In the period 2013-2015, we never got to experience a nice laptop. For the office work these people do, that 12-year-old Mac would be an all-around better experience.
The HP screens at the time were truly horrendous. They're leagues better now but still poor and clearly worse than the 2013 mac. They are relatively contrasty, but the colors are all weird.
The trackpads have also improved a lot, but there still is some kind of odd lag when you use them [0]. They're horrible enough that many people still prefer carrying a mouse when using them away from their desks, and the mice we're provided aren't some Rolls-Royce ultra-premium affair, just a crappy, laggy Bluetooth Dell.
They also degrade from daily use: the screen hinge loosens so it moves if you look at it wrong, barrel power connectors from older models somehow become unreliable, and USB ports start to get loose (although when new they tend to be extremely tight). USB-C ports tend to become mushy.
Newer models tend to be quieter, but up until a few models ago, the fan would go wild for no reason (I work with many "non tech" people, so they basically use Outlook and browse a few random websites).
Now, if you only ever use your laptop tethered to a big screen and whatnot, and it's basically a very compact and easy-to-cart-around desktop, then sure, I can understand not caring one bit about all this: you never go out in the rain, so you never get wet feet!
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[0] This is possibly a Windows driver issue, since on my lower-end Elitebook (840 vs 1040) from 2020 running Linux, this doesn't happen.