Those are some really interesting options. I recently picked up a new Asus Zenbook ux330ua (basically Macbook Air, but significantly better specs and ~$500 less) for mobile use and was going to start looking for a new desktop option.

I really like building my own systems, so buying one prebuilt would be strange, but that's some serious hardware for pretty nice prices.

You could, but you have to be really careful with the motherboard socket, because Intel went a bit crazy with LGA2011:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7773/intels-three-versions-of-...

Yeah, if I built my own, I would probably end up just going with an i7-6700K and something like this:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/GsX88K

Meh. I'd rather get one of the dual-xeon setups I listed. For the same price you're getting a quarter of the ram, half the processing power, a quarter of the CPU cache. It will do better in single-threaded apps, so it all depends on the tasks you're facing. I do lots of 3D rendering, so I'd pick more cores, RAM and cache.

The other advantages of your setup are power efficiency and NVMe.

Oh, and btw, you will save yourself a ton of money if you just bid on the components on eBay. Take, for instance the CPU. You're going to pay $325 for it. Now check how much they auction for:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_sop=15&LH...

I would agree. I would not want to do serious editing on a laptop that costs >2x, has half the ram and like a third of the CPU/GPU power. Just not worth the money and time. So much longer waiting for renders...

Half the ram? Where are you finding a macbook with 32gb of ram?

Ah yea I suppose depending on your workload. I've never hit much more than 30-40G doing editing work, I guess some people might use more.

As always, depends on usage.

if you're going THERE, why not get a cloud VM and a chromebook?

Because

1) If you're processing huge files, you need a very fast internet, which very few people have.

2) Lots of software doesn't exist in the cloud version.

3) It's actually quite expensive to rent something with such specs.

Is there any cloud VM actually support nesting VM inside it? (I need to run Vagrant with VirtualBox as a provider due to availability of images.)

Sometimes you want a GPU near a display.

Great idea. I might get a cheesegrater Mac when my MBP dies and then a cheaper laptop to remote?