> Immediately after buying a new laptop

No. I could go by with an older one, or in a pinch I could repurpose my current media server. Or I could put my data in an SSD with a bootable partition and borrow my wife's laptop...

> huge environmentally destructive supply chain to create.

Sunk cost fallacy? If the major electronics factories explode today, the existing computers won't stop working. If any of the Anthropic's datacenters go under, the compute capacity would have to be rebuilt.