Carrots, onions, and other biannial plants will sometimes behave as an annual. It’s usually caused by a genetic mutant but it can be environmentally triggered.
In the wild they naturally are a mixed of annual and biannual plants depending on the growing conditions.
My newest computer is 5 years old. I see no reason to upgrade anything.
I use my 11 year old laptop with Linux mint on it as well. I maxed out the RAM on it and swapped in a Sata SSD, it boots in under 40 seconds and does everything I need it to do. It’s one of those cheap underpowered Celeron processors as well.