It might be, that they are pushing that thrend into the market. As mentioned, they have the competition of tablets now. A tablet with a physical keyboard does a lot of things a laptop might do, with way less weight.

Also aluminium helps with refrigeration, even if it is more expensive.

However, it might be that powerful, thicker laptops are becoming more of a niche for professionals. As for playing games, buyers who do not know much about hardware wiill enjoy more the lines of thin laptops, even if they are technically suboptimal.

Check this brand of professional laptops, for example. The top propositions:graphites and above, and notice the weights. The graphites, which are beasts, weight 3,9 kg, about 8,6 lbs. The charger is a thick brick weighting 1 kg on its own.

The Sapphire relies on its aluminium frame in order to help it dissipating heat. While more expensive, it is thinner and it weights less too. Just about 2 kg. Roughly a half.

I´m a bit late to the party but here are my 2.5 euro cents .
I own a low end tablet with detachable keyboard running windows, two laptops and several desktops.

For starters, WTF is a gaming laptop, what defines it? keyboard RGB, racy design and a dedicated GPU?
I ask this because I consider my tablet a gaming device, is extremelly low end but is only used for playing games. Today morning kid was playing PSP´s LocoRoco with touch screen.

I'm not familiar with laptop's version of the 1050 but if the screen resolution is low, then it has more than enough power to play most games. That said, like mystikmind2000 has said, most laptops tech froze in last years. If they have to compete with tablets, at least they should have ANY advantage. My old laptop with a 7 year old, 2 gen i5 can pretty much compete with any dual core of recent generations, including i7's (not in power consumption though).
There are so many things wrong with laptops marketing that wouldn't fit in a book.

Still selling 1360x768 resolution screens, where most things just don't fit in the screen?
Laptop quality can vary a lot, even in the same brand and tier. Some laptop's can hold battery power when suspended for months, others just drain in a few hours.
Why does AMD CPU powered laptops are considered low end, cheap and only employ low end parts like screens, keyboards, hard drives? I've never saw a AMD model that was comparable to Intel in quality of parts (TBH didn't check recently).
Also why does those dual core Celeron powered laptops still sell for more than 150 euros? Those things struggle to open a JavaScript heavy webpage, like facebook. Pretty much should be discontinued 5 years ago, or sold for 100 euros at most, even a 50 € phone/tablet is much more powerfull than that crap.
While we are at it, why do most laptops with integrated GPU come only with 1 stick of RAM, chocking performance by as much as 30%? I never saw a low to mid tier laptop with 2 sticks of RAM.
Windows 10 drains a lof of battery by itself. Newer versions are far better in that regard, when properly configured but still awfull.


To finish the big rant, not always desktops are better purchases than laptops (price to performance), when we consider monitor, keyboard and mouse in the total cost, specially when not comparing higher end stuff.
There are still a few "good" laptop around, mostly on profe$$ional range, like Tecras, Thinkpads and maybe some Dell models

There are numerous problems with gaming laptops, from the price/performance ration being abysmal to the additional compatibility problems with many games and laptop GPU drivers.

But most of all, the main issue IMO is the fact a laptop's gaming performance is always limited by temperature.

Thermal throttling is unavoidable on laptops, which is why peripherals like external coolers for laptop exist. However, an external cooler destroys the laptop's main selling point, portability, so if you are using one you might as well game on a desktop. Also, that's a use case where a non-gaming laptop with an external GPU would work just as well.

Overall, I think gaming laptops are just a bad purchase. I think high end PC gaming should always be done in Desktops and the only games adequate for a laptop are those playable on an integrated GPU (older games or games that don't demand much from the hardware).

This is completely wrong. Laptops have made massive progress in last 5 years, your information is completely outdated. Just two weeks ago my niece brought me her new "gaming" laptop to install Windows on it. It is better than my desktop computer, and that laptop is the cheapest model with only a 1050Ti. Now you have laptops with even a Nvidia 2070 or 2080 with 8GB of video memory which are much more powerful. Xbone and PS4 have just 8 GB memory in total and can not be compared to these modern laptops. You should really do some research and get new info.

im happy with my Alienware 17 R5 Signature Edition
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz
NVIDA GeForce GTX 1070
16 GB ram

its very beefy which i wanted, i use a wireless mouse. dont seem to have any prob so far with heating. i debated the whole laptop vs pc but ive been moving further and further away from being tied to a desk unit for awhile, spouse took initiative and bought me this unit for my bday recently. its my 1st laptop. im surprised at how much i like it (and windows 10 !). its very very easy to use. gaming so far has been seamless, some issues with keyboard placement and wrist being caught on edge, fixed with good long gel cushion. there is some color difference between playing on my tv remotely from pc vs laptop. when not perched on a mobile desk by my couch i have a nice lap table with vents for my bed. battery not so good, maybe 2hrs of gaming. wt is heavy


edited for typo

That's one heck of an overclock @2020GHz, But I'm sure you mean 2.2GHz, or 2200MHz...

Enjoy your purchase. There is plenty of great games that will run swiftly in your new machine. Have fun!!

yes, sorry, youre right

If you can, go test and then buy the thing later. Screen REALLY matters to me, I say.
IPS displays are a must for laptops (personally speaking) and yep, sad to see the quality of some displays in modern lappies compared to older ones.

Oh ,my! A dual core Celeron sounds so nice compared to the SINGLE core processors from yesteryear I see in the offers every day from all the big chains. My poor sister fell for it and bought one. Windows 10 was unusable so I changed to a lightweight Linux/GNU distro on her laptop.

Spot on!

Are those still a thing? The last single core I bought was a Asus 10" netbook with those really bad older Intel Atom but to be fair it had hyper-threading, like 10 years ago?

They even seem to sell fairly well. I am so sad for all those disappointed people who find out their mobiles are much more powerful. No wonder really as they buy €700 mobiles but are only willing to pay €250 for a laptop. That is how you end up crying. Maybe they should buy a keyboard for their mobile instead... but the screen stays small then.

Even at 250€ price range, performance should be far better. While I don't have a laptop factory to argue this, comparing to other devices on the market the performance of something like a Celeron n3350 is ridiculous nowadays. Unless is used stictly for non performance tasks, like typing (but once again, unless it has stellar parts like keyboard, screen and battery life 250 is too much).

Something like a new n5000 quad core should be much better, but it seems the market is very slow to phase out old stuff and adopt newer parts.
This also happens on mid and higher end, although most consumers don't know what are buying (and that's ok) but find daunting seing all those numbers on specs. Brands and shops should ensure the best products, right... Yeah, thats not how it works on big mall shops.

I would like to see some lower end laptops by major brands based on arm selling with some linux distro, maybe some android OS, like a Raspberry stuff, although without Microsoft/Intel patronage could be difficult. Chromebooks are not a thing in Europe.