I'm intimately familiar with syncing, but many of the programs I use have more than just the external assets, they also have internal cache files that represent

I'm intimately familiar with syncing, but many of the programs I use have more than just the external assets, they also have internal cache files that represent the states of various projects at any given time. It would be very difficult for me to synchronize these in a safe way especially considering that they're scattered across various hardcoded relative folder structures. And honestly it'll be more of a pain to have to worry about. I've never felt like my laptop was under significant risk of being stolen, even when I'm traveling overseas. But I'm very careful with it and I keep track of it at all times - putting all of your personal data on a single external hard drive just means that that's the thing that is at risk of being stolen instead. I also use a combination of automated encrypted back ups via crash plan and bit locker on my laptop. Even in the extremely unlikely event that my laptop was stolen, it's highly unlikely they be able to get access to my actual data. Having a single laptop lends itself well toward my nomadic lifestyle. It's easily powerful enough even with a mobile CPU and of course there is less heat and power usage associated as well. And I'm pretty sure that I am immeasurably more of a power user than 99% of the general populace (virtual machines, 3D modeling, music recording, video rendering, backend dev work, VR, hell even the occasional triple A game). So if the processor/gpu meet my needs I'm pretty sure that everyone else will be fine too. It just seems like in this instance our use cases are very different, which is fine.