These things came at a great time for me. My late-2014 MBP just received its last major OS upgrade (Big Sur), so I'm officially in unsupported waters now. I was getting concerned in that era from 2015-2019 with all the bad decisions (butterfly keyboard, no I/O, touchbar, graphics issues, etc.) but this new generation of MacBooks seems to have resolved all my points of concern.
On the other hand, my late-2014 model is still performing... fine? It gets a bit bogged down running something moderately intensive like a JetBrains IDE (which is my editor of choice), or when I recently used it to play a Jack Box Party Pack with friends, but for most things it's pretty serviceable. I got it before starting university, it carried me all the way to getting my bachelor's degree last year, and it's still trucking along just fine. Definitely one of my better purchases I've made.
On the hardware side, you could open it up, clean the fan, re-apply thermal paste (after so many years, this will make a big difference) and maybe even upgrade the SSD if you feel like it.
That way, this laptop can easily survive another 1-3 years depending on your use-cases.
I actually ended up pulling the trigger on the base model 14 inch that was announced today, but I'll probably still keep this laptop around as a tinkering device in the future. If not only because it's still fairly capable, but I've got some good nostalgia for it!
I've used it since 2017 and it hasn't changed much since then. I guess they recently added some online code pairing feature I don't plan on using, but that's all that comes to mind.
On the other hand, my late-2014 model is still performing... fine? It gets a bit bogged down running something moderately intensive like a JetBrains IDE (which is my editor of choice), or when I recently used it to play a Jack Box Party Pack with friends, but for most things it's pretty serviceable. I got it before starting university, it carried me all the way to getting my bachelor's degree last year, and it's still trucking along just fine. Definitely one of my better purchases I've made.