Pretty much any desktop is going to outperform a laptop, especially the GPU.

no non mac laptop today has that with good thermals.

so some boxes has amd ai 390 or 395 with 128gb.

for laptops need to wait for good thermal releases.

so it feels that macs dominate these days in all your points, and has good resell price later, except being mac)

Can take the 48GB SODIMMs that are on the market now. That'll handle a spreadsheet or two.

The Framework Desktop is a really interesting machine, however it lacks the PRO in the name, which means that you're going a bit cheaper, but missing out ECC RAM option, which might be interesting for a Workstation that needs to be as stable as possible.

The HP Z2 Mini G1a Workstation has PRO available, which therefore also has unified ECC Ram up to 128GB, but this adds a premium of around 500 bucks. Maybe not worth the money.

So if you wanna go Desktop, you could pick:

  Framework desktop with Ryzen AI MAX+ 395+
  HP Z2 Mini G1a with Ryzen AI MAX+ 395+ PRO

  HP ZBook Ultra G1a
  ASUS ROG Flow Z13

Otherwise you have to go Full GPU, which is non-unified and either very expensive or you get far less VRAM for AI workloads.

Here is a test with more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyrAur5yYrA

I'll get myslef one of these as well when I cash in my invoice for last month's work.