Actually I really like my 2017 Macbook Air which I bought for $800. It may have old architecture but the system 'just works', mainly because of the OS (Windows 10 is far from being a decent dev platform). I primarily use it for coding, and for heavy tasks I delegate them to my PC running HyperV.

P.S. I don't really understand the obsession with getting the latest gen processors. Your main bottleneck is IO anyway if you don't do video encoding or some other CPU intensive tasks.