What is the size of the hard drive? I wouldn't buy anything less than 2 TB nowadays.
Nowadays all MacBooks have solid state hard drives. I opted for a 512 GB drive, although much larger drives are available. I would never go back to a mechanical hard drive in a laptop - the speed advantage of the SSD is too valuable to me.
I've got 12 TB of external hard drive storage on my desktop computer which contains all of my media files, and 2 TB of cloud storage available to all of the computers. The MacBook is for on-the-go creative work and the relatively small SSD is more than enough for me.
The main selling points of the new laptop are processor speed, high resolution display (3024x1964) and battery life (more than 12 hours, depending on what you are doing). The processor has 8 'performance' cores and 2 'efficiency' core which facilitate the extended battery life.
I use an older 2012 Apple Macbook Pro, here are stats on it:
Processor: 2.5 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5
Memory: 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Storage: 2 TB
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB
I have the HDMI output going into a 32" Samsung TV. I use an Apple Magic Keyboard and Apple Magic Mouse 2 (no batteries --- thank God!!!). My laptop stays closed and is docked with a fan on the desk beside my main one.
I like to hear about machines that work for years and years. Seems like when it is time to upgrade you should consider a Mac Mini, since you only use external display.