Recommendations for hardware (Desktop/Laptop)?

So I'm quite conflicted as of now.

I've been looking into it for 2 weeks but still can't decide. Then I remembered that I'm part of a 36,000 member community with experts everywhere, so why not ask here.

Here's the "context.md":

I am a university student but I also love experimenting and working with open source frameworks, LLM's and so on.

So a lot of the parts I value is:

Portability

A laptop let's me easily go anywhere with all my work, projects, anything and everything. An issue though, because they are laptops, that means it can't handle as much power (watts) coming in = less performance. This again could be a very minor issue, don't have experience with MacBook's but everyone running portable AI friendly local hardware always has a MacBook.
Yet another caveat, it's still possible to have a whole home desktop and connect with it over the internet, but there's always a slight delay and it might not feel that smooth ruining the "flow state" or whatever, not too sure about this as I haven't tested anything other than https://remotly.com for very light usage.

Performance

The most important thing is performance of course, I want to run 9B, maybe even Gemma 4 26B on top of tons of locally running systems like my own OS, Hermes, cron jobs and so much more.

The overall aspect

Things such as "If I get a laptop, will it sound like an airplane", "Is the plastic good enough to sustain 4-5 years of constant moving in a bag, floors (in a bag) and so on?", "Is the battery life good enough to hold out if I am out the entire day (considering I don't use 100% of the ram of course)", "Cuda would definitely be good, most of the open source LLM stuff is easily supported by Cuda, aka RTX's", "Can 32GB's of DDR5 RAM hold out better than a 16 GB RTX 6 GB VRAM laptop, and is it even worth getting a RTX x on a laptop? Instantly butchering the capabilities?".

Now the budget aspect

Over the last few weeks I've had come to a few conclusions:

Portability will be quite important for the future, but portability could also mean worse performance. So:

Do I just get a temporary (1-2 years) $600 laptop with 24 GB's of DDR5 but that does butcher the other parts such as the CPU and AI TOPS or whatever?
Do I save for a little bit more, have a lil patience and get a Macbook Pro with $2,000 or less (About 8-10k AED (UAE"s Currency) )
Do I wait and save and get the soon to launch RTX Spark Laptops?
I have an old laptop that's like comparatively cheap, it's just an old but smooth working laptop that I got for like $100 a long while back, I can save up and use a remote connection for a better home set up (connected context below and above, I'd ideally not take my more expensive laptop/desktop to uni because it can get damaged, physically)
Get a proper Desktop, upgrade over time, best option for performance but worst for portability and ease of use.
A mini PC with amazing performance and insane RAM, cheaper than a desktop, portable but not usable anywhere, less upgrade options. Mix of Desktop vs. laptop but worse in both directions (could be better maybe).

Current set up:

(The older laptop) + A mini PC at home with 12.9 GB's of usable DDR4 (16 GB RAM total), 512 GB SSD, AMD Ryzen 5 5560U with Radeon Graphics (No dedicated GPU), it's a laptop CPU made into a Mini PC CPU I believe, not too sure.

Now thanks to the grace of God, I am at a comfortable position to save up for a little bit more and get quite an amazing setup. Maybe I even take a bit longer and put like $3-4k for a macbook pro or something?

Disclaimer: I am not a hardware expert, I don't know everything about laptops or PC's. I know 10x more than the average Dad but 100x less than the average PC builder, hopefully by the terms I used in the post you'd understand how much I do comprehend, I know about i9 11xyz but I don't know what the xyz after those 2 numbers means, multi threading or whatever, no clue.

So if you guys have advice, AI prompts to figure it out or straight up recommendations, that would be the best.

Quite a big rant.

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Recommendations for hardware (Desktop/Laptop)?