But again, power consumption.
And I'll grand you that it's possible that this Chinese laptop I got will have its logic board burn long before the 10 year mark. Sadly that's likely, yes. But as mentioned, when I am not programming or doing anything that requires more CPU power, it performs perfectly for what I need, and I feel better knowing it consumes ~17W on average.
There are likely sweet spots e.g. get a Ryzen R1000 or V1000 mini PC and stuff it with 2x NVMe and 2x SATA SSDs and have it drive 2-4 displays at home. The displays will likely consume 20x the power of the machine itself (lol), and that machine is very likely to last for a long, long time.
For my needs however a Chinese laptop that costed me 160 EUR and has proven it can last anywhere from 7 to 11 hours, is perfect. (Though I'll get pissed if it lasts less than 5-6 years for sure.)
There were likely several versions of lcd panels with it - the t420s's I got were way better than the t480 and e580 I picked up recently, even though there's 6 years between them. I believe the ones I have are either 1920 x 1080 or 1600 x 900 (whereas the t480 is inexplicably only 1366 x 768 ; and e580 is 1080p but awful contrast or gamma or something)
Is there a good site for recommended upgrades by model? I'm pretty pleased with this as is for Linux use already. (8 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD).
My desktop PC, which is over a decade old, performs fine under current releases of Linux and Windows. My laptop PC is a bit over two years old. Performance is lacklustre under the current release of Windows. Newer isn't always better, particularly when you're comparing laptops to desktops. I also doubt that many laptops would have an equivalent lifespan to a desktop. They have more perilous lives due to their portability and portability means they are frequently built with more compact and less robust components. That is especially true when you consider that laptops are more difficult to repair (due to more integration and more difficult to obtain parts).
Granted, the iMac G4 is in a different league since it is a 20 year old machine that was produced when performance jumps were more meaningful. I can see it being a useful machine for someone who has limited interest and use for computers or simply wants something disconnected to get work done. I took the latter approach in the early 2000's and it worked quite well. (The fastest machine I had was a 68040, and I did run NetBSD on it.)