[herbst]

I have a Thinkpad from 2011 so i know what you mean. However i would argue 2013 and 2014 are not old enough to worry yet. Most better laptops already were > Sandy Bridge and had 8 or 16GB of RAM. Most also already equipped with a SSD.

If you look at my 2011 Thinkpad however, it was shipped with 4GB of RAM and a 512 GB analog disc. Spending only like $200 extra it turned into a 512GB SSD + 16GB RAM + new battery beast which outperformed my 2014 MBP for nearly all of my development tasks.

So i guess it depends on how you look at products. I tend to buy things i know i wont have to replace anytime soon.