I just would like to know if this is a common practice, and how often does your company replace your laptop?
Give the employer they want and need, justified. A business or tech head (not just manager, but someone the buck really stops with) has a budget and they should spend it as justifies the business case, not conforming to an arbitary rule.
Asking developers to work on 6-8 year old hardware is definitely penny wise/pound foolish, tho.
I would say most developers don't need new hardware unless they are building games or developing CPU intensive application. Most laptops today have more resources than your microservice will have in the cloud.
The bigger the company the more likely they are to have a policy such as the one you mentioned. I've been working for startups recently, and what you are issued is what you'll be working on for a long time, at least unless it stops working and can't be replaced (eg, a 2012 Macbook Air that isn't manufactured anymore)
As a team lead I have to fight to get the best hardware for my team sometimes, like 16GB RAM and good screens. So sometimes someone gets an upgrade just because of that, and the old laptop goes to someone who doesn't need to run demanding apps.
If I can get my performance boost through software decisions and better development practices I get less complaints.
Hard part is sometimes we are forced into upgrades as 3rd parties end support for one thing or another, then it dominoes into everything else (Yeah, Windows 10, talking about you.)
95% of the developers who claim to need frequent refresh (absent of failures) are full of malarkey. If you have enough resources to begin with, computers don’t improve on fast enough cycles. Exceptions are people doing GPU workloads or who have very high memory requirements.