>A colleague of mine purchases fresh laptops for when he goes overseas and then never uses them again. He doesn't even work in an industry where commercial secrets are common. I'd hope that anywhere that features security implications or commercial secrets would also act at this level.
IMO that's an overkill. Why not just use ICloak [1] or Tails [2]? They are both Linux distributions which boot from USB stick without touching hard drive, randomize MAC address and give you access to Tor and other goodies.
[1]: https://icloak.org/