Slowing down laptop refreshes is so short sighted. One of the cheapest productivity boosts you can give someone is a faster laptop. Better than hiring another dev to join a bloated team.
Laptops are not advancing that much yoy and a 3 year cycle is already aggressive.
4 years was the standard for a long time, these days many companies are moving to 5 or even 6 years for laptops.
Hell right now I have employees at 4 years that refuse to change out their laptops because they have no problems with them and want to keep them longer
My PC from 2011 still works fine. My 2015 MBP lasted until 2022 (when it broke, it was actually still working fine). So I'm skeptical you really need to be refreshing every 3 years.
That's machine durability rather than performance.
Performance translates into more productivity for employees spending most of their time in front of one.
Even JIRA and Confluence are way faster on my 2021 M1 compared to my 2019 MBP due to the javascript runtime being much more performant. Admittedly a bit of a cherry picked example, but still.
4 years was the standard for a long time, these days many companies are moving to 5 or even 6 years for laptops.
Hell right now I have employees at 4 years that refuse to change out their laptops because they have no problems with them and want to keep them longer