Encrypt the shit out of it, unplug it and your good.
Why so many bizarre steps?
It depends on how many coins you have, and what percentage of your wealth those coins represent.
If you had 5,000 BTC and this represented 90% of your net worth, would you then hesitate to spend $2k on a new secure laptop in order to sleep well at night?
I agree with you I would maybe buy new as well in that case, but even then it is plain stupid to spend $2k on it. It is something often seen that people (or companies) with money tend to over spend, just to make sure they get the best. The problem here is that for cold wallet functionality you don't need a core i7, 8GB RAM, full hd display and nVidia Quadro graphics. What he could have bought was a cheap laptop, and put a hardware encrypted ssd in it (or let a company do so). This is like companies spending $400k on a new website, which actually doesn't have that much functionality at all.