Notes, they don't have to go on the INTERNET but you may want to have a LAN in your house for file sharing. I know it's just as easy to run back and forth with a thumb drive, and depending on the size and shape of your house, it's probably as easy as anything to do it that way. In my application, I write skeletons of songs on the first floor and finish them on the second flood. COULD I move files with thumb drives? Yep! But I was a network tech when I worked. As simple as it is to file share across a LAN, I'd never do it that way. Many people don't grasp that "the network" is not the internet. The internet is just one thing you can do on your network. (Not to say YOU don't know that, Notes.) Those things have become conflated to mean one thing like wifi and data have. Wifi is the wireless connection between your phone and your home router, just like the connection between a laptop and your home router. When you are out and about, that's not wifi, that's cellular data. Ands the box you get from the cable company is not really a router. It's a whole "thing" that really doesn't even matter. You want to call cell data usage wifi, sure. Call it Fred if you like.

But you are on the right path here with 2 new identical laptops. You will love yourself more if you get a SSD. In fact anymore you might even have to order a regular spinning media SATA drive as an option. I have a lot of video on my media computer that was on spinning drives. As the videos played, every 6-8 seconds was a clicking sound as the drive spit out the next segment of data. I replaced both 1TB drives with SSDs and now the playback is incredibly smooth. It wasn't cheap and a PITA to do, but the end result is worth it.