I usually build a desktop for $4-500, because I reuse parts from the older one, and don't need a gamer graphics card. I blow the money on the mobo, CPU, and lots of ram.

As a gamer I've fallen into upgrading my CPU/mobo/ram and GPU in an alternating fashion every 2ish years.

I might break the pattern this year though, I got a 3900x last year around launch and moved my 4670k to a home server. I've been pretty impressed with the 3900x while the 4670k has been maxing out all cores in the server for some tasks so was considering buying a second 3900X(T) to replace the 4670k again. But with the rumours about the 5900X, I might end up putting the 5900X in my desktop at the same time as a 3000 series GPU and moving the 3900x to my home server.

Same, I saved my ssd/hdd, gpu and case and built a ryzen 3700x with 16gb of ram for less than 400 dollars altogether. My 1k USD laptop has half of that computing power, easily.

My Aero 15 would never throttle, with a 7700HQ + 1060. There was a 700mhz penalty in that generation (3.5ghz vs 4.2ghz for the 7700k), but I kept it pegged for hours and it was rock solid.

Most laptop cooling is awful, but you can certainly find laptops that are well built if you look for it.

Not sure you should weigh bloatware, either. You can trivially install a fresh Windows or Linux and you have to on a custom built PC anyway. If you buy a premade PC, it probably comes with the same crap.

For what it's worth, I switched to a desktop once the core race heated up - now I've got a 12 core 3900X.

I can't believe how much faster it is when it's using all the cores. Night and day. Highly recommended. And 12 cores is barely scratching the surface of the crazy workstations you can build these days.

For tasks 4 threads and less, it would be a bit faster than a current gen Intel laptop chip, but I don't think it would have been worth the portability penalty to me personally if that's all I did with it.