You've got the strategy I've started using. After years of frustration from cheap laptops that get hot and have poor battery life and can't really be upgraded I recently switched to a computing strategy that seems to have started well for me: Get a nice Chromebook, then use that to access a beefy PC remotely(Chrome Remote is free and pretty simple to set up with just a bit of port forwarding needed, and works fine on coffeeshop wifi).

But the "beefy PC" is actually a business SFF(ThinkCentre 715s) using the AMD A12-9800 APU, the final version of Bulldozer and a starter for the AM4 platform. The only thing superlative about it is the amount of external storage I added - a whole array of cheap USB flash, multiple HDDs, etc.

I actually splurged on that APU and could have gotten the A8-9600 for better value, but I liked the idea of "maxing out" the old architecture.

Now my upgrade cycle will probably be: wait a year and then get whatever is discounted then. By getting the APU now I already see a nice 2-4x improvement over my last laptop, and I defer a decision on getting a discrete GPU. And when I'm out the Chromebook gets me an all-day battery, local access to Android and Ubuntu apps, and 80% of the Windows experience(some network latency, and no remote audio) for productivity.