I use leased laptops for work and I generally replace them after three years with whatever is new and shiny. I recently upgraded from the M1 macbook pro to a shiny new M4 Max. And damn this thing is fast. My build speeds massively improved. This is cutting hours of time in a week. Which is an unbelievable upgrade of my quality of life. And it also means I run tests more often and pro-actively instead of going "I could do it but it's going to take five minutes". My build speeds are now routinely below 1 minute. Ram throughput and having more CPUs are making the difference here. I was expecting my builds to be faster with a new laptop. But not by 4-5x. So, I don't think I'll ever be faffing about with thermal paste. Because that would mean I'm penny pinching instead of getting a massively faster laptop.

It's a judgment call of course and a bit personal. Not everyone needs a fast laptop. But I gladly spend a bit extra for this stuff. On the current contract, my new laptop is costing 100 euro per month. That include apple care coverage. And it's a 48GB M4 Max. Worth every penny. I'm not going to worry about thermal paste because I'll upgrade before that becomes an issue.