Laptop quality is wildly all over the place. From 'that thing is a tank' to 'the ink on the keys is coming off, and the trackpad does not work right'. QA is garbage for most of these laptops. They should be fairly dialed in at this point how to make decent ones. But not really. The ergonomics of most is junk. From poor flex on the screen and keyboard, junk keys, touchpads that are too big and impossible to not rest your palm on, to weird hot spots from poor thermal management. Most of the screens are decent though now. For a long time they were fairly crappy. But yeah if you are using a laptop older than 5-8 years. It is time to start thinking about a new one. I just recently updated my 10 year old one to something fairly new. It was night and day on performance.
There have always been terrible laptops in the market. I generally recommend the following process:
1. Go to a physical store and try out the keyboards / mousepads of the laptops you're interested in. Don't worry about specs yet.
2. Look up the service manual of that model, ensure that you can replace important parts (M.2 Drive and Battery take top priority for me) with relative ease. You can probably do this on your phone after deciding you like a particular keyboard/mouse.
3. Ask the store for the specs (CPU / GPU / RAM / SSD) you want, especially if the SSD is soldered on (though ideally, buy a replaceable M.2 slot). If not available at the store, _MAYBE_ buy online, but in my experience the Retail return model just works far better than RMA to manufacturer. So prefer retail / buying off the shelf.
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Normally, I start to see things worth buying at the $700 point, but with compromises of some kind (poor screen, bad mousepad, etc. etc.). Moving up to the $1000 price point, things are generally better with only one thing that's really terrible that I probably can live with (maybe soldered on SSD, a lower quality screen, or something along those lines).
Moving up to $2000 price point, I get good everything, but price sucks.
I'm pretty confident that I can find a good $700 to $1000 laptop, especially if you give me the freedom to choose a user-replaceable M.2 drive, and give me an hour or so to replace it with a $130 1TB generic drive. It won't have the best specs by modern standards, but it'd beat the pants off of any old Thinkpad from 5+ years ago. Bonus points: I probably was going to do this anyway to wipe out all that terrible crap-ware / bloatware on the laptop. So doing this _AND_ upgrading to 1TB or 2TB is just cake.
But just using the most modern chips (even of a lower-value one, like an Intel i3 or AMD Ryzen) will grossly improve battery life and have all sorts of other advantages. You really don't need to jump for the $2000+ models.
