I don't have 624 gigabytes of space. I've always used a laptop. I'm not very tech savvy; is there a way I can update my laptop to do that? Or would I need to buy some kind of new one?
You don't need to if you don't have such a big space in your laptop you can just set the Bitcoin core in prune mode and set it to 20gb or lower. You can find it under settings from Bitcoin Core and enable it.
Check this image as reference:
This time it won't sync or download the whole blockchain; it only downloads the latest blocks and data.