Older laptops tend to have all sorts of hacks, master passwords and whatnot, because they realized these scenarios happen and with physical access and enough time it's generally game over any way.

I wish this were possible with current-day phones. I've had multiple instances of a friend or relative either buying or getting handed an older iphone, and if the previous owner did the responsible thing of resetting the phone beforehand, it will refuse to get past initial setup without a stable wifi connection and the previous owner's icloud credentials. Tracing down the previous owner and getting them to change their password or disable the "find my" feature for this one time operation is harder than you'd think, especially if it was passed down multiple hands or the account is from a different person (and the original owner was never aware). In some of these instances we've had no choice but to throw the brick away.