Thanks everyone for the feedback. Some background: I currently use in my home office (I work from home) a Windows desktop and a Macbook Pro provided by my employer. I had previously been using the desktop for music production, but also as my household file server, and in general what I use to play back music and podcasts while working. The Macbook was my daily driver and I used it for work, but also personal projects (photography/graphic design/web development). It was also my surfing the web machine since it was portable so I could undock it and take it with me upstairs at the end of the day. My employer has recently made us sign a contract that says anything developed on company hardware is the intellectual property of the company, so I need a new laptop for my personal projects. To avoid operating too many computers and also save electricity, my plan is to move the server stuff into a dedicated low power headless server and get a windows laptop for my daily driver, personal projects, and I had hoped, music production. Because of the photo and graphic design stuff, the computer I get needs to also have a screen that covers close to 100% the sRGB spectrum.
I guess now I'm wondering if this is just going to be a fools errand. When actually doing recording, the computer will be plugged in and connected to the external Steinberg UR22 (I am aware that I may need to upgrade to thunderbolt based external audio solution, but hopefully not). But then I was hoping to be able to open up Cakewalk (so weird calling it Cakewalk again after calling it Sonar for so long) when not in my office to be able to work on midi and other audio bits through the internal audio hardware. I'm not expecting high fidelity when in this remote mode, but it would be nice if I could playback with my VSTs and audio tracks without pops and dropouts. I don't know if its better in CbB, but I guess I'll have to deal with remapping my audio channels when switching between audio hardware but maybe this is easier these days.
This DPC latency is my biggest concern. I understand it can be helped a lot by turning off a punch of features in one's laptop, but I wish there was some sort of rule of thumb regarding chipsets, CPU, and maker to help determine which laptops to avoid. I was considering an MSI as I saw that some people had good results with them for music, but then I started finding other people who were having performance issues with them for music. The Dell XPS 15 is also an odd duck. It seems to be one of the more popular laptops for audio production but is also notorious for DPC latency issues with conflicting reports all over the place regarding if its been fixed or not.