I'm typing this post on an 11 year old Dell Latitude D830 running Ubuntu. 5 years is not some amazing lifespan for a laptop, especially these days with such incremental improvements in processors year over year.
Unless you're gaming on your laptop your requirements probably aren't that much higher than they were half a decade ago.
I have a 10 year old Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz running Windows 10 being used as a Plex Server. It’s only slow when overtaxed because I haven’t bothered upgrading to 8GB of RAM or replace the hard drive with an SSD.
Luckily it has a gigabit Ethernet port so it can take full advantage of my gig internet.
My Asus UX31A is six years old and still going strong. It's a pity the RAM is soldered in at 4GB but certainly not worth replacing the entire laptop for it. And it wasn't top of the line - about $1300 as I remember.
Perhaps you just haven't really used a windows laptop recently and only remember the old days when Windows laptops really did only have a life span of about 3 years.
Not only do I occasionally game, I also have a DSLR that generates quite the stream of photos and videos to edit. I also run a bunch of VMs (including one of Ubuntu, my favourite dev environment), and I use photoshop and illustrator for the occasional design thing.
Me too.. but mostly just personal stuff. I use DarkTable and Gimp for that. I did this on a 13 year old machine running Linux. It is still running but I got my hands on a cheap NUC that I use nowadays. My machines are pretty much running 24/7 all year around..
My impression when it comes to Mac is that people don't want to pay ludicrous prices for repairs e.t.c.. anymore. Also that they can not upgrade because their current machine can't handle the new OS e.t.c..
The trick to avoiding this is to buy laptops with good displays in the first place. The D830 has a 1920x1200 display that is a little bit dimmer but just as readable today. It's not a retina display, but it looks just fine to me.
I was looking at laptops about 3 years ago and it was extremely hard to find ones that didn't use that cursed 1366x768 resolution.
Unless you're gaming on your laptop your requirements probably aren't that much higher than they were half a decade ago.