ssh As a rule of thumb almost anything that higher spec consumer grade hardware can do, can be done almost as well on much cheaper hardware.
Realistically if you really can't do something on a budget laptop, you need to start looking for an HPC. Which should be provided by your PI/employer.
In my opinion you should treat your laptop as a portable terminal and prioritize comfort over hardware specification. When I was searching for my current laptop I cared more about whether it had a HDMI and ETHERNET ports and comfortable keyboard, than exact CPU specs or size of RAM.
There are obvious downsides to using older hardware. You're essentially forced to use Linux, because Windows will be laggy or refuse to install. You will need to be more conservative with resources, eg. no more than 64 firefox tabs open, which might feel like very little during active literature reviews. Software that you are forced to use might be a pain (Microsoft Teams is really resource hungry for some reason).
The gist is that if you're willing to be slightly more minimalist in your computing you can get a high build quality very capable laptop for less than 500$ or even 200$.
