[Applejinx]

For what it's worth, I recently went and traded in a pile of old Macs because I was travelling with a newer Macbook Pro (16" with M1 Pro) and needed to be able to effectively replace not only my first early M1 laptop, but also the iMac Pro I'd got as a flagship machine before the M1s came out.

Between those and an intel Mac Mini and an older iMac, I got over $3000 in trade-in value. Made me feel quite foolish for not having tried that before. The oldest iMac still got me a couple hundred bucks, as would your seven year old MacBook Pro most likely. A two year old high-specced computer?

I get that the list price for any of these is still way higher than putting together a PC from parts… but again, I belatedly traded a bunch of stuff in, and got more than $3000 in gift card value from Apple doing it. That makes 'rebuying a macbook pro every two years' a whole other state of affairs. I'm kicking myself for not having tried that earlier: I'm sure I left over $1000 on the table simply by letting recent computers sit around unused rather than immediately trading them in for Apple credit.