I wouldn't consider the ThinkPad line "budget" in any way --- that would be the IdeaPads.

You can find them on eBay for cheap. That makes them budget. Nobody cares if they were $9000 last year or a million when they were released. They are commonly found as cheap old business equipment or found in the trash. You can get a thinkpad today for under $600 new and and old ones for under $200. Ideapads have sometimes been more expensive than thinkpad so it's not a good metric.

It's really not. The top CPUs in T420s are power hungry 35W parts that are far slower than current <7W ones designed for fanless devices.

https://hwbot.org/submission/4201949_toanmai84_xtu_core_i7_2... https://www.hwbot.org/submission/4330573_tankdriver69_xtu_co...

What is more innovative? More Mhz? Vector calculations? JavaScript? Depends what's important to you.

The new CPUs don't put much more power, but they're crippled by the mitigations (old ones too but weren't when you used them), use way less power, many are fanless (saving more power), and it's not like anyone was struggling with not enough power on computer anyway. Intel had innovated a lot, especially their video decoding and graphics.

I'll take a crappier CPU with a better screen any day but luckily I don't have to choose with these.

A two-core i7-2620M with max of 8GB RAM? It might suffice for office work but I wouldn't call it competitive.