I would say that for a light laptop user, the main reasons to upgrade are:
- displays: make a big difference for watching youtube, reading, etc. You can't really compare a 120 Hz XDR retina display with a 10 year old display.
- webcam: makes a big difference when video conferencing with family, etc.
- battery life: makes a big difference if you are on the go a lot. My 10 year old laptop had new something like 4 hours battery life. Any new laptop has more than 15h, some over 20h.
- fanless: silent laptops that don't overheat are nice, nicer to have on your lap, etc.
- accelerators: some zoom and teams backgrounds use AI a lot, and perform very poorly on old laptops without AI accelerators. Same for webcams.
If you talk about perf, that's obviously workload dependent, but having 4x more cores, that are 2-4x faster each, can make a big difference. I/O, encryption, etc. has improved quite a bit, which can make a difference if you deal with big files.
Still, you can get most of this new stuff for 1000$ in a macbook air with M1. Seems like a no brainer for light users that _need_ or _want_ to upgrade. If you don't want to upgrade, that's ok, but saying that you are only missing 2x better performance is misleading. You are missing a lot more stuff.