Yeah, and that's kinda sad. However, old Thinkpads are still totally usable. I was using T420 until a year ago and the only thing that I hate about it was the absolutely awful screen. It was 1600×900 with absolutely horrible colors. There's a few ways to install a better display but it might be tricky [1].

Otherwise it was a decent “daily driver” laptop, in many aspects superior even to current gen MacBooks, particularly repairability, ports, keyboard quality. I'm using a 2020 MacBook Air now which I bought to try out the M1, and some aspects where it excels are screen (obviously!) and speakers, but I think those are comparable to a little more modern ThinkPads (xx40 maybe?).

[1]: https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Replacing_T430_screen_with_a_... (ThinkWiki got some terrible ads since I last checked it, get your ad blocker ready)

I have T420 (and T430s) as well, but I think at this point it no longer qualifies as a daily driver. Even with 16GB of RAM there are times when the machine is just slow. Even with a replacement battery I only really get a couple of hours. Performance is just not there for anything serious. I've used linux and BSD's on it for about 5 years. It's true you can repair it fairly easily, but after getting my hands on a refurbished M1 MBA, there is a huge difference in quality, performance, battery life, etc.

Yeah the speakers in the newer macbook pro models (even the late intel ones) are really impressive. I almost never use them and when I happen to play audio through them I nearly always catch myself thinking "wow, those are really good".