I think buying new expensive laptops for personal use is waste of money anyway, unless you do something like heavy video editing or gaming where you really need the power.
For my daily use (programming hobby projects, studying, browsing) a 10-year old Thinkpad T520 with i7 is more than adequate after upgrading it with SSD and 16GB of RAM, especially when using Linux instead of Windows.
If you do something really intensive on CPU and/or RAM, use a desktop instead of a laptop, the expandability and thermals are much better. And 10 year old CPU is very slow and inefficient by modern standards.
For my daily use (programming hobby projects, studying, browsing) a 10-year old Thinkpad T520 with i7 is more than adequate after upgrading it with SSD and 16GB of RAM, especially when using Linux instead of Windows.