I don't understand why anyone still buys/builds a PC tower anymore

I'm in the same boat. I've only bought gaming laptops. Made so much more sense for when I was in college, portability, and I don't need an actual desk. And these days, a gaming laptop at around 1k, esp with seasonal sales, will get you very good specs

It depends on the type of games you play and how serious of a gamer you want to be.

There's also the "look" of one's rig.

A $2K laptop will do the job but it's not going to properly compete with a gaming "system", driving dual 4K, 240Hz monitors, and putting on a "light show" through a transparent case.

Unless you spend $5K on a laptop, you will end up with subpar graphics subsystem, using lower speed shred main/graphics memory.

I don't do gaming, but I have a $5K MacbookPro, driving two 4K monitors, for software development purposes.

When I'm on the road, I take along a single 4K think monitors that doesn't need a power supply, and feeds for power/data through a USB-C high-speed cable.

Yes and no. CPUs and GPUs in a laptop will always be less powerful and will be limited even beyond that because of physics. Thermals especially on modern laptops are kind of tragic. You have to make all components low power to start with and it doesn't take much before they start throttling.

And you can build a better performing tower usually for considerably less.

And they only get more expensive if you are one of the dummies paying 2K for a 80 or 90 series Nvidia GPU.

I would be willing to pit my midrange tower against just about any laptop.

Oh and find me a laptop under 2K that can be upgrade to 64GBs of RAM. and 7 TBs of storage.

Laptops have their place but there will never be parity with desktops.

Except that gaming laptops will thermal throttle due to compressed x86 components inside a small form factor. A cooling pad is pretty much a necessity for a gaming laptop, unless you play very old games that can run maxed out with demanding mods on low end integrated graphics, or anything worse than Intel Iris Pro or AMD Radeon Vega. And also laptops made after 2015 have the CPU and dGPU integrated to the motherboard, so you can't upgrade nor replace them. Not to mention that laptop components are weaker and more expensive than their desktop counterparts (some exceptions exist).

I'm sorry, but if even a factory overclocked RTX 4090 alongside an undervolted Core i9 14900KS and 64GB DDR5 @ 6400MHZ can't handle the newest games in 4K with path tracing (full ray tracing), then a flagship laptop with RTX 4090 (equivalent to desktop 4080 which is over ⅓ slower than desktop 4090) and i9 14900HK (around as fast as i7 14700KF but throttles like crazy) stands no chance. Let's not forget that laptops have to be plugged in while gaming or else the performance and battery suffers, and don't last as long as desktops (up to 5 years before dying or life support, compared to 10).

to me, it's a matter of preference, modern gaming laptops are impressive, but Towers can make hardware changes and upgrades are easier especially if you know enough to do it yourself.

I love my desk top. Its repairable. stable upgradable and gives me an excuse to be at my desk, instead of nomadic...😷

Why would I want to unplug everything every time I needed to take it elsewhere?
Plus no risk of lithium battery explosion, which shouldn't happen in a good laptop anyway but it absolutely can't happen in a desktop.

Gaming.

Any suggestions? My next station will either be a gaming laptop or a desktop. My current laptop became obsolete almost as soon as as I bought it

because maybe you only work or game from home. the desktop will still be faster than the same or higher priced laptop anyways and it will be noticeable.