Hard drive space and RAM are both cheaper for desktop machines than for laptops, and ESXI is free and not difficult to set up, and then you can run all of your VMs on that desktop machine ESXI server and use the VMWare client on your laptop to connect to those VMs.

That would free up space and alleviates the need for 16GB RAM in your laptop, and I would guesstimate that it would be approximately the same cost to buy a cheap desktop + middle-of-the-road laptop as it would be to get a high-end laptop.