20 if you are being minimalist.

If all of the work is just typical office stuff, even the software from 15 years ago is more than enough.

I could have done 99% of my last job from an old Atom X5-8500 tablet if I bolted on a good external display and HID. I am perfectly happy navigating with a little J5005 Pentium Silver NUC since everything lived in a browser anyways.

If excel needed more time, let it cook, long as you don't exceed a million rows it'll probably get there someday.

Video and production work requires real compute, but 99% of us desk jockeys could have got by with thin clients and a little elbow grease. But I would contend that we may be living int he golden age of low-watt computing because we have the some combination of all computer games ever written in the history of man, the vast majority of them compilable and runnable on today's ardware or otherwise emulatable

And thanks to Valve, there is it now a very established market for running even AAA 3D titles on dog shit commodity hardware. It's pretty much just the mfps crowd that have to buy each next years release of post-processing laden Call Of Modern Battlefied Spartan Halo 2027, that need to worry about graphics falling behind, when we have such a rich ecosystem of excellent indies. All of my favorite games are like five or eight years old (I play a ton of Crab Champions, and Risk of Rain 2, etc with my gaming crew, these days).

All that to say, old hardware will keep us gaming indefinitely if the will is there. I think the big threat is people forfeiting the sovereignty of their compute and consumption for the illusion of convenience, the same way so few people own ebikes in my country while everyone has Uber and Lyft fees every month on their statements.

Wair till people figure out they can be their own GeForce Now for $0 with Tailscale and Artemis/Apollo.

I upgraded last December from almost top tier 2014 pc to mid level pc from 2024 and it's a significant upgrade. From ddr3 to 5, i7 4790k to AMD 5 7600. I draw and can do it on an old ipad pro, still new pc feels good, mostly from the stability point.

I set up an enterprise grade firewall on a computer I got from a deceased relative. It was probably already 8+ years old when I got it and had been replaced with something newer. I had it for a long damn time; during covid when everyone was home and a lot of people were having their home internet connection clogged up with multiple users doing zoom sessions and remote work, my crusty machine was doing a good job of balancing out and shaping our meager 100mbps connection for five people. I think the CPU maybe got to about 10% at peak, but usually ran closer to 4% most of the time. It used up all the memory, but that was how it was supposed to work. It had a traditional spinning hard drive in it.

I kept it until it was about 18 years old when I finally retired it. It never broke, never failed, hardware just quietly ran and ran. I never turned it off unless the power went out. I only retired it because it was too big (full desktop tower case) for the home I had moved into. I wiped the disk, loaded a minimalist linux on it and donated the whole thing, monitor, keyboard mouse all in perfect order.

Hardware lasts and you don't even have to be nice to it.