In typical organizations, you always have a grizzled backend developer well-versed in creating REST backends in Java and a frontend developer well-versed in whatever. So you play to their strengths.
The last "new" computer I bought was a laptop in 2011. A 13-inch Macbook Pro with a 2nd gen i7. After that, I've always bought used, as the place where I'm in right now, the people prefer the newest shit, so I happily buy their used laptops for cheaps. Mind you, these are T480 Thinkpads that people are selling for very cheap in order to buy the latest.
If it's one of those small ones (thinkpad x60 and x2xx generation), use it as a robot controller. Put it on top of an iRobot Create and experiment with robotics.