How old is your work laptop?

Personally mine is only a year old, but I don't think it matters that much.

Like everything it depends on what you are doing. If you are doing frontend work that requires you to have 3 browsers open at a time + an Electron-based editor + a dev server you are going to need a lot more than someone who is writing low-level C code in Vim.

As an aside: newer =/= better.

I got a Dell XPS 13, one of the fastest models, in 2013. It doesn't feel slow.

Recently I got a brand new XPS 15 with the most RAM and fastest CPU. The storage was M.2. It felt sluggish and I returned it.

Laptops are weird and hard to shop for.

Technically, I'm working on a hand-me-down machine manufactured in 2011. But it's got an SSD in it now, which is 95% of why new computers are faster, was extremely high end when it first came out, and it is powerful enough for what I do (I don't compile code), that I have never said "gee, I wish I had a newer computer".

The surprise and mild indignation that you seem to be expressing makes no sense to me. Unless you're doing heavy computational work on your personal workstation, any reasonably modern laptop (past 5-7 years or so) is going to be powerful enough.

I use a 6 year old Thinkpad and a 4 year old Macbook. If I need to compile something big, I ssh into a build server.

The mid-2015 and earlier Macbooks are better anyways.

Currently running an i7 15” MacBook Pro - from 2014 and have no issues with it.

W450 must be 5 years now.

It is fast, but a tank. Has that Optimus combined Intel, nVidia graphics system, pain in the ass edition. Otherwise, awesome machine.

2015 MBP. Function keys, good set of ports, I’m happy. 16GB RAM will hold me for a couple more years. My slowest tasks are I/O bound anyway.

If we're talking Windows vs OSX, I would definitely say I'm more productive when programming on a Macbook.

If we're talking a two-year-old Macbook vs the latest Macbook, I don't think there's much of a noticeable difference in productivity