What petty hill will you die on?

thrawn@beehaw.org to Chat@beehaw.org – 161 points –

For me I say that a truck with a cab longer than its bed is not a truck, but an SUV with an overgrown bumper.

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I don't know what you mean by Gamings laptops are good. Compared to what? Has there been a rumor that they were bad? I might be missing context. I mean they're obviously not as good as desktops, but they're good considering the size and mobility

Gaming laptops have historically had a reputation for being bad for a number of reasons:

  • Poor build quality compared to flagships in comparable price range

  • Poor battery life

  • Poor cooling implementation

  • Poor relative performance due to above points

  • Large and bulky, offsetting the value of portability

  • Cut corners in other ways, like poor color depth, having a good graphics card but a CPU bottlenecking the games that would utilize it, lower RAM than it probably should have for gaming, etc.

And then not to mention some people just don't like the neon green and red "gamer" look many of them have. There's the distinction here between "gaming" laptops and gaming-capable laptops.

All of those caveats have, again, not been a thing for decades.

There are some nerds that parrot things without understanding them still hung up on saying these things, though.

Decades? Did they even have gaming laptops in 2003?

Hell yeah. The 2003 Alienware Area 51M packed a Pentium IV, a 1200p grade 15 inch display (apparently with both widescreen and 4:3 configs as options), had both Nvidia and ATI GPU variants and traded punches on performance with contemporary desktop alternatives, albeit at a much higher price.

It also came in a rather snazzy lime green color as an option, just like the desktop area 51 from that year. It wasn't even the only alternative in that type of spec that year.