It's hard to go really wrong as long as you avoid the bargain basement laptops. Currently I am running an A10-6700 Best buy clearance from 2 years ago, a Ryzen 1700 build from last fall, a T450s, surface, and 2015 (IIRC) MBP. Honestly, for day to day use, all of the real computers are acceptable (I don't like using the surface as a computer unless I have to). For specific tasks, certain systems pull ahead (the Ryzen build was created to cut the time required to run models by a factor of 4). The MBP MSRP was ridiculous as it had all the boxes checked and Apple upgrade prices are crazy. It is by a mile the worst value of the bunch (admittedly a base MBP is a much better value but now that everything is soldered on, buying the base and upgrading later doesn't work).
Personally, I find buying an acceptable computer with lots of ram (8 gigs min, preferably 12+) and spending money saved on useful peripherals (4k monitor etc), makes for a much more enjoyable experience. The Ryzen system replaced a Lenovo desktop from ~2007 that was noticeably slower but still entirely functional.
For a general use desktop, I would look seriously at a Ryzen with integrated graphics. They will never match the performance of a quality graphics card, but reviews are pretty positive for performance vs cost. The A10 will likely get replaced with either this or a threadripper depending on how much modelling needs to be done (probably close to an order of magnitude cost increase there though).