Durability is huge; when I initially went SSD (very early), the speed benefits were somewhat less clear, but I was killing about one laptop hard drive a year with drops.

I've got pretty much my whole life on my laptop (100+TB of pictures, for one) ... plus 3 OSes (Windows 8.1, 7, and Linux... plus virtual machines for XP and an alternate Linux distro) and have 2x 1TB drives in it now (and about 700gb free, since the 2nd was upgraded from an a 256gb very recently.)

That sounds like the guys who were selecting laptop for my employer's professional services organization back around 2005-2006. They bought 17" Entertainment notebooks. On the earlier of the two models (Inspiron 9300) they got them with a big GPU, too, and the attendant extra heat sink and fan... at least the 2nd (9400) was slightly lighter without the GPU.

The first of the two was old enough that in laptops there pretty much only were only pretty much crap processors to be had; the second was decent when it came out although for no good reason they kept ordering the Core Duo when the much improved Core 2 Duos came out for another year and a half.

Absolutely beautiful screens, though; when they disposed of a bunch, I rescued two (one to run, one for parts) and dropped a C2D 2ghz into it. Makes a pretty nice media player and terminal for use around the house.

I was (and am) in software development and in particular we do big customer-hosted enterprise apps where it's a HUGE convenience to be able to build and test the whole app on your own machine rather than building and deploying on the network somewhere. Nobody even thought about using a laptop for our kind of development back then; the first machine anyone liked enough to make an optional standard for developers was when the first good quad-core laptop chips came out in very early 2011.

Surprisingly, after a decade and a half of "no matter how fast we buy, it's not fast enough" for my work the first generation i7 quad core desktops we bought in 2009 and the first generation quad core i7 laptops we bought in 2011 have all remained pretty good for use now. It's been really nice to actually have machines stay ahead of needs... even if it is a bit weird to see other developers deciding not to bother to take an offered upgrade when the machines go out of warranty.

Actually, he was talking about both -- saying that at the < $500 range, both older and newer ones were still topping out at 4gb.

"Over 4 years old" covers a broad range, and the nearer end of that is also going to be essentially 100% 64-bit systems.