right, but that makes you an extreme exception, not the rule. and if you built that for someone else, it would cost them more.
my last desktop was built. the skeleton still exists in my crawlspace. i haven’t actively used a desktop in nearly a decade (home or work).
cant’ stand tiny little laptop monitors. Got 2 of the big ones hooked up to my work PC…(which is a laptop - when I have to travel…) - Yeah, I’m ‘extreme’. but building a computer is not extremely difficult - I taught my son how when he was 10, he helped me build a 7 PC order on the kitchen table…
The last one I built I just asked for a bottle of bourbon as my fee.
i’m tied to duel monitors at work and i have a second monitor at my desk at home. even when i travel, i have a portable USB monitor, which makes travel less painful.
I hate when my monitors duel. I always feel like I’m going to be caught in the crossfire.
$700 bucks for a roller chassis, 5 grand for a crate motor. Why would anyone ever spend more than 6,000 bucks on a new truck?
Personally, I like to be able to configure and upgrade my own machine. That makes me a PC guy. Also liked the prices. Being retired, I moved from a laptop back to a desktop for my design work.
AMD 3.2 GHz, 32GB RAM, middle of the road Radeon graphics card driving extended desktop on twin 27" monitors. With SSD, case and power supply right at $800. Not bad.
(I once paid $500 for 15 MB of RAM. I think I still have those two sticks around here somewhere)
Stepping up from my 10 year old 2GHz 17" laptop with 4GB into this build put me on another planet. This thing installed Windows in 5 minutes and opens photoshop in 5 seconds. 
I remember my first 1gb hard drive - $200!
Pretty sure my first 10Mb hard drive was in the $thousands.
(Designed and sold a massive 768K MB ram upgrade for a PC. Sold it for a couple $hundred domestically. Got orders from around the globe but Uncle Sam made me restrict it to the U.S. because of some weird technology export laws.)
and it was full height?
my first MS machine was a used 5150 with two full height, 5.25" floppies. i replaced one with a 10mb full height HDD. 384k of RAM and a CGA monitor (state of the art!).
sigh
i’m ok with buying new laptops nowadays.
i paid $400 for 16mb of RAM (4 sticks) used that i found in a local paper. it was a bargain.
For a TRS-80, I worked for a guy back in the day, and one of the customers we had got 2 5MB hard drives. Each the size of a shoe box, for 800 each.
In 1981 (2?) I had a 10MB hard drive for my Apple II. It was about the size of 3 desktop cases stacked on top of each other (on their sides) — something like 15-18" tall. I believe Fujitsu made it. It had wheels 
yeah, when i was in the army in the early 80s we had a removable 20mb ceramic platter hard drive that was part of the back of a box truck on a 5 ton frame. it was volatile, so we would spin it up, load data onto it from a 9" mag tape drive, work with it, then save it all back on the 9" mag tape, pull the platters out of the drive case (the size of a mid-sized portable fridge), then drive off to our next site.
oh and this was all in a SCIF environment.
it was nuts. and i’m sure the army paid ungodly boatloads of cash for it.
I have similar needs, although I’m less picky about the display. Drives my husband crazy. 
We’re just not really the norm from my experience, especially among people who ask for help shopping for a computer.
the last two Dell laptops i’ve had have had fantastic displays. the XPS was the best. the G5 i have now is very nice. the HP in between, ugh. bad impulse buy for a “good price.”
Just want to butt back in and welcome you to the never ending story.
Easy to get sidelined in these forums and no one really minds (provided the medication needs are met), and eventually it gets back on track.
This time we all seemed to have colored inside the lines, so hope for us yet.
Hopefully this question has been answered for you.
Get a Mac if you want the “cool” kids to like you. Otherwise, you have lots of options. I have a ton of both platforms. My Apple products tend to be iPads (Pro, Mini, Air, iPod Touch…) and Apple watches. I avoid Android though, because I don’t want to feed the G beast any more than I already do.
I’m opposite. I avoid any and all Apple products. They aren’t worth the iTunes tax and everything in the interface is backwards. It used to amuse me that they had to hide 2 of the mouse buttons on the keyboard so as not to scare the users I guess.
As far as I’m concerned the iPhones are awful too. I’ve had one for work for the last several years and have never made friends with it. I really wish they’d change over to Android.
FWIW, Chrome OS just works too. No muss, no fuss.
Oh well, to each their own 
I hear you. I started with an Apple IIe and then got an original, 2 floppy Mac and was an Apple fanboy until the Mac IIc and then went Windows because I joined a PC company. I had both a Mac Server and a Windows box simultaneously when I worked at AOL. I’ve had a Palm Treo, Samsung Galaxy phone, and now several iPhones and lots of iPads. I fully understand what I loved and hated about each platform. These days, I’m 100% Windows for my desktop and laptops, Apple for tablets and watch and Amazon for photos and music. No Alexa, no Google Home…
I totally prefer the Samsung Galaxy rate of innovation and quality (ignoring the Note incident). Apple’s iPhone is a slow follower in a lot of ways. What keeps me on the iPhone is the integration with my Apple Watch and how I understand that Apple handles privacy. I have zero expectation of privacy with Android.
My iPads are awesome and the iPad Pro is outstanding. That’s my gig.
I actually had a Mac G4 when OS-X came out. The only affordable thing on Apple was always the operating system, but even with Unix under the hood it drove me crazy.
For the record. Apple and PC swim equally well when hit by storm surge, which is to say not at all. 
I’ll probably just get a computer from Walmart and hook a VGA monitor up to it, getting old and my sights going I need something a little bigger than a laptop. Thanks for your input I’m sure we’ll talk again.Cheers