• Lettuce eat lettuce
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    5 months ago

    No hate, but I’ve never understood gaming laptops. They are noisy, hot, almost always with severely nerfed performance compared to their equivalent non-mobile components.

    They are heavy and bulky with poor battery life. They are often garish, which makes them less suitable for a professional environment if you’re in a workplace where that matters.

    It just seems like the vast majority of gaming laptops give you the worst of all worlds. Worse performance than a desktop rig, and none of the good things about a laptop, like portability, long battery life, etc.

    To me, there are a few exceptions though:

    1. Gaming notebooks. You sacrifice a bunch of performance, but you at least gain back some of the benefits of a normal laptop like slimness, portability, battery life, etc. As long as you don’t play super hardcore games, the thermal issue isn’t a huge problem.
    2. Your work has a ton of travel and you are allowed to do it on your personal laptop. You can work and game on the same device. If you are traveling like every month flying everywhere for work, that makes sense to have a single device to do it all on.

    Again, no hate, just my $0.02

    • Redex@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      For students a gaming laptop makes a bunch of sense, since taking a PC with you back an forth every time you go back home can be a major hassle.

      • Lettuce eat lettuce
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        5 months ago

        Eh, depends I guess. Now days I would just use my Steam Deck and be happy with that.

        But back when I went to college, high powered gaming handhelds weren’t a thing.

        Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

        • Redex@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Well I personally need my laptop for collage as well. And it comes in handy if it has a powerful GPU if I need to do anything more intensive on it (e.g. machine learning or game dev). Steam Deck wouldn’t really be adequate there. And even if it wasn’t for my usecase (which isn’t representative of every student), most students will probably still need a laptop to bring with themselves sometimes to collage, and if they also want to game, makes sense to buy a gaming laptop instead of a gaming PC + a regular laptop.

    • crusty@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      One advantage is you get a lot of performance in a laptop form factor for much cheaper than an equivalent ultrabook

      • Lettuce eat lettuce
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        5 months ago

        That’s why I said one of the exceptions was gaming notebooks, something like the smaller Razer Blade laptops.