But a cheap laptop does not have a alternative or later use in life really where a Xeon with vPro has other uses
going to think for for a while, by that logic could also spend the $$ replacing 2017 15” MacBook Pro with 16”, but no idea how a Radeon 5300M or 5500M would work for games.
ponders replacing 6 x 4tb SATA ssd with 1 x 16tb NVMe ssd... probably not cost effective at all !
maybe i am loosing my mind avoiding a virus locked down at home. hmmm.
Heh. I heard that COVID19 causes chills, fevers, difficulties breathing and loss of sense of smell and wallet control. I already blew close to 1k on geek toys in the past 6 weeks. Eeeeeh, you also can't raidz2 or raid10 on a single NVMe SSD, so...eeeeeeh, not a great idea either.
To be clear - You don't have a use for a cheap gamer laptop later in life? Your son will very likely beg to differ.
The Radeon 5300/5500Ms are Navi based, and probably somewhat similar to a GTX1050/1060M (well, minus AMD's piss-poor VCE video encoding support, but that's on my t740 thread). As a proud owner of a 2014 MBP13 and someone who buys and provisions hardware for my gig..the MBP16 is significantly better than the entire fleet of touchbar MBP15s that we had - I still hold the Retinas and Unibody at a higher regard (RAM slots and SSD swaps, hells yeah), but it's a definite improvement over Jonny boy's prison lunch tray (what I call the Touchbar MBPs). I would rather buy one for sure than that NUC9 Extreme. Hell, I like the MBP16 so much I might even do it out of my own credit card*.
The other problem with the NUC9 extreme is that the Xeon is an E2286M, and from what I remember, its not socketed but soldered onto that entire NUC module - no possibility of re-use somewhere else, it sits on a prison of its own existence (take that, Jean-Paul Sartre). I am not even sure if Intel will stick with the form factor going forward, pending uptake (my guess from the gamers not on the Intel payroll is..."*meh*, don't care, BRB Ryzen instead"). Having an E2286M and only 64GB of RAM just seem...pointless. If you spend 2k on a NUC9 extreme loaded up, might as well spend 4k for a Lenovo P53 (or whatever the latest one is called) and at least get 4 SODIMM slots right off the bat and built into a serious quality laptop. Or wait 6 months and see if there's a Ryzen 4000 Mini-ITX with the same features at half the price.
The usual cynical IT director adage comes to mind -> "Interesting gear. But not out of MY budget".
* Pending approval from the minister for financial affairs. AKA the missus. AKA the one who shall be obeyed.