Perhaps that's not what you had in mind, but I still use daily a Late 2008 MacBook Pro without any issues. With some patching I've installed Catalina on it so it will still receive security updates until.....2023 I think?
I just keep it as my kitchen laptop for playing music, watching YouTube and looking up recipes. It's completely noiseless, has pretty good speakers, and since I replaced the drive with an SSD 6 years ago it's pretty quick as well. Even the original battery still holds about an hour of charge if needed. Laptops just don't age the way they used to.
Same here with a 2009 base mac mini, upgraded a long time ago to 8gb and an ssd. My kids use it for scratch, youtube and homework. My wife uses it for online shopping. The key hardware features are dual cores, 8 gb ram and an ssd (not emmc or hdd). Anything with that kind of spec can still run modern software reasonably well.
I've also got a 2008 Macbook Pro that keeps proving to be useful; new batteries are dirt cheap too. Any links to patching or reasons for upgrading to Catalina?
I just keep it as my kitchen laptop for playing music, watching YouTube and looking up recipes. It's completely noiseless, has pretty good speakers, and since I replaced the drive with an SSD 6 years ago it's pretty quick as well. Even the original battery still holds about an hour of charge if needed. Laptops just don't age the way they used to.