[thepoet]

I know it is unfair to compare a laptop with a desktop but this is what I did based on my specific usage pattern. I upgraded from a 13 inch 2014 Macbook Pro with 8G RAM to a 27 inch iMac. I am still keeping the Macbook pro for travel, though I fear the out of warranty costs now that AppleCare is over. I wanted a faster, powerful machine but did not want to move out of macos with all those programs and settings from last 4 years. Also, all the other laptops had some issue or the other be it the low battery life in ultrabooks to the bad display, weak processors, or build quality issues. The 2017 touchbar MacBook Pro is the best built laptop one can buy but it looked too expensive to me for what it offered. I explored building a hackintosh but it seemed maintaining it was too much pain.

I now use a Samsung T5 external SSD over USB-C as my macos boot drive in the iMac, which I can unplug and boot with my Macbook when I travel. While being 40% cheaper than the 15 inch macbook in my country, the iMac gives me a faster processor that does not thermal throttle after 5 minutes of 100% usage, 24 GB of cheaper RAM (and yes easily upgradable to 64GB), a gorgeous 5k display, lots of ports, a somewhat better graphics card for the rare gaming and lots of space to save data files. With some difficulty, you could also replace the drives and processor.