In theory this sounds good but in practice I'm not convinced there's a lot of value in the extension aspect. My desktop is 11 years old. It's an i5 3.2ghz quad

In theory this sounds good but in practice I'm not convinced there's a lot of value in the extension aspect. My desktop is 11 years old. It's an i5 3.2ghz quad core, 16 GB of memory, SSD machine that I built from individual parts for ~$850 in 2014. It has been running 24/7 since then. It handles 4k and 1440p dual monitors without issues for all of my programming / video editing needs. The only thing it doesn't do is run modern games. I only say all of that because I've never upgraded individual parts on it. Every X years I build a new machine that lasts. I've been doing that for around 20 years now. The only thing I replaced once (not this machine) was a PSU that got nuked by lightning and not having a surge protector. Personally if I were going the laptop route I'd much rather get something 80% as fast as the framework but at half the price (or less). There's a ton of laptops in the $600 range that crush my desktop in specs. Things like a Ryzen 7 7730U (16 threads @ 4.5ghz) with 32 GB of memory, 1 TB+ SSD, reasonable display / ports etc..