Using external storage with Thunderbolt 3 as your boot drive poses absolutely no bottleneck and doesn’t really cause any inconvenience with a desktop. The iMac 5k is the only “good value” Mac in my opinion, you get an $800 PC with a $1300 monitor for $1800 in a nice all in one package, and the only remote competitor…

External storage, which Mac OS has always worked wonderfully with as a boot volume, isn’t at all a bottleneck with Thunderbolt (and USB3.1 is not a bad bottleneck for much cheaper drive bays - 1250MBps is more than enough for most people). There’s thankfully still a RAM door. I’d be more worried about the difficulty…

Apple quite literally sells a four year old computer for $999, only a hundred cheaper than when it first came out. The final model of that exact same 13" MacBook Pro, with the same chassis that’s now 8 years old. The baseline 15" retina MacBook Pro from 2012 (4 years!) is actually faster, albeit was more expensive,…