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At one point in time I went whole-hog on a 17 inch gaming laptop that I treated as basically a folding desktop, it's this absolutely garantuan ASUS thing where

At one point in time I went whole-hog on a 17 inch gaming laptop that I treated as basically a folding desktop, it's this absolutely garantuan ASUS thing where the entire rear of it is one huge heatsink unit for the CPU and GPU. If you intentionally consider it from the design perspective of something that will only be relocated once every few weeks or months, and is certainly a lot lighter than a mini-ITX desktop PC and traditional monitor, it can be a good solution. Sadly, the touchpad on it is nowhere near as well refined as the apple version. I can comfortably leave that thing spending 8-12 hours to encode a HEVC/H265 codec 4K video without worrying about it melting down.

vvanders 5y ago
Even "gaming" laptops have come a decent ways in size/form factor. I picked up a Zephyrus G15 a bit ago and it's pretty portable while having the ability to sink a good amount of wattage.
- walrus01 5y ago
  yeah I just checked and the modern version of my 17 inch laptop monster, which is about 8.1 pounds, is down to 5.95 pounds in a 17 inch version with an intel 11800 something mobile CPU, and geforce 3070 in it. Probably still has a huge external power brick.
  - evilduck 5y ago
    I have a 13" M1 MBA and a 16" Legion gaming laptop. They're both good computers for their own purposes but the 230 watt power supply for the Legion is almost as heavy as the MBA (2.2 vs 2.8 pounds). Carrying the computer and the charger together my Lenovo is more than 3x heavier than the MBA. Gaming laptops are just more-portable desktops to me. I would slip the M1 in a backpack without a second thought. It can even share a charger with my phone. Bringing a gaming laptop anywhere would need to be well justified.
    - rejectfinite 5y ago
      But people seem to use those maxed out 16" macbooks as desktops replacements anyway, always hooked up to monitors. Even though it seems like Apple is not even testing hooking up monitors.
    - vvanders 5y ago
      The better comparison would be the 16" MBP and those look to be within about 1lb of each other. If your not going to be using the GPU heavily then you can just use a standard usb-c charger with should be similar in size to the MBP.

vvanders 5y ago

Even "gaming" laptops have come a decent ways in size/form factor. I picked up a Zephyrus G15 a bit ago and it's pretty portable while having the ability to sink a good amount of wattage.

walrus01 5y ago
yeah I just checked and the modern version of my 17 inch laptop monster, which is about 8.1 pounds, is down to 5.95 pounds in a 17 inch version with an intel 11800 something mobile CPU, and geforce 3070 in it. Probably still has a huge external power brick.
- evilduck 5y ago
  I have a 13" M1 MBA and a 16" Legion gaming laptop. They're both good computers for their own purposes but the 230 watt power supply for the Legion is almost as heavy as the MBA (2.2 vs 2.8 pounds). Carrying the computer and the charger together my Lenovo is more than 3x heavier than the MBA. Gaming laptops are just more-portable desktops to me. I would slip the M1 in a backpack without a second thought. It can even share a charger with my phone. Bringing a gaming laptop anywhere would need to be well justified.
  - rejectfinite 5y ago
    But people seem to use those maxed out 16" macbooks as desktops replacements anyway, always hooked up to monitors. Even though it seems like Apple is not even testing hooking up monitors.
  - vvanders 5y ago
    The better comparison would be the 16" MBP and those look to be within about 1lb of each other. If your not going to be using the GPU heavily then you can just use a standard usb-c charger with should be similar in size to the MBP.