Last time I got a new laptop (which probably was a few years ago now) the price just wasn't reasonable for a large enough SSD, 512GB is my minimum for it's occasional multimedia uses and database work.

Even now prices have apparently come down but larger drives often only come with high end SKU's. Looking at the MS Surface page (https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/config/Surface-Laptop-...) 512GB is only available if I also get 16GB of RAM and a core i7 model, which is well beyond my needs and desire to pay for. 1TB is only comes with the silver model.

So even my next laptop might feature spinning rust, if any exist. On the plus side HDD's add a level of chunkiness I like in laptops.

Going to an SSD is like going EV vs petrol car. You'll be blown away by how obviously inefficient decades-old technology feels. Even a cheaper SSD is much faster than a top-of-the-line HDD - and the analogy to EVs hold here as well.

For power users (as one of the other child posts states) the extra space afforded by HDDs did have a use case a couple years ago.

As an application drive, or a drive in a device where the only other moving parts are input keys and fans, SSDs are completely the way to go. Even if dropped weirdly at least the data is probably recoverable.

Unless it's cheep bulk or high-write turn over spinning rust makes less and less sense. Though the cost for bulk storage still favors it. (Given the write endurance, I'd also prefer SSDs to be at least half as expensive.)