any reasonably mid to high tier product from 2011 is still perfectly usable today thanks to CPU stagnation from intel from no real competition from AMD in that time frame. it's only the release of ryzen 2 years ago that finally ignited real advances in (consumer level) CPU power from both teams. before that it was only sandy bridge which really moved the needle from it's previous generation. Ivy Bridge, haswell, broadwell and skylake were only around 3-5% improvements over thier previous generation counterparts, and i5 only got more than 4 cores (without H/T) in recent gens (7th or 8th IIRC) My 2015 broadwell i5 thinkpad is not showing any signs of needing replacement (for what I use it for) soon. It'll quite easily push on for considerable time too with replacable, well everything except for the CPU. regular SATA SSD, (small) M.2 slot, 2 RAM SODIMMS (albeit Maxed out with 16 GB but that's a platform limitation) accessable other parts with just a screwdriver