To add a bit to the story, I did spring for a gaming laptop in 2022 because my 2013 MacBook was starting to show its age, and the model I bought came with a 2070 mobile GPU which has been fine playing newer games at modest settings at 1080p.

Laptops and prebuilts were basically the only affordable option in the pandemic, and I had a laptop need at the time. But for a while now it has still been a goal of mine to put together a good desktop. The last desktop I built was in 2010 (I snagged a GTX 580 GPU and felt like such hot shit then).