I only retired my 2014 MBP ... last week! It started transiently not booting and then, after just a few weeks, it switched to be only transiently booting. Figured it was time. My new laptop is actually a very budget buy, and not a mac, and in many things a bit slower than the old MBP.

Anyway, the old laptop is about par with the 'big' VMs that I use for work to analyse really big BQ datasets. My current flow is to do the kind of 0.001% queries that don't fit on a box on BigQuery and massage things with just enough prepping to make the intermediate result fit on a box. Then I extract that to parquet stored on the VM and do the analysis on the VM using DuckDB from python notebooks.

DuckDB has revolutionised not what I can do but how I can do it. All the ingredients were around before, but DuckDB brings it together and makes the ergonomics completely different. Life is so much easier with joins and things than trying to do the same in, say, pandas.