I don't see what you'd meaningfully gain from a new laptop every year, their performance doesn't increase that much year-in-year.

For other hardware its IMHO more an an issue (e.g. giving developers only laptops or standard desktop PCs when they could make use of properly fast workstations, skimping on screens, ...), and probably in most places just a case of "that's we do for everyone, and doing it differently for you sounds like effort" and structures that make it overly complicated to approve such requests.

(FWIW I work for a small company that only does software and haven't seen a reasonable hardware request rejected yet - if someone can articulate why what they have isn't enough, they get a reasonable upgrade)