I don't understand why people choose laptops

[Legion88]

How do laptops hold up physically?

Has anyone ever gamed on one for like 4 hours a day over several years without any part failures?

(I'm surprised how many people encouraged me to derail the original thread that triggered me, even though this conversation that I'm talking about has absolutely nothing to do with the original thread (about game performance). I don't think it's polite to derail a thread, and people trying to pick on me for having the audacity to not derail a thread with an original topic that's spawned at minimal of 3 pages is just as perplexing).

I played FFXIV on both desktop and Laptop.
I also play other games on Laptop.
My Laptops always got killed from Hard Disk failures, probably caused by the often transporting i had to do for work, after 3 to 4 years.
All other parts were not defective in any way.
As background, i was a soilder and brought my laptops to training areas, because i had allways a supporting background job in the camp with lots of time to kill.

The only thing you should do is cleaning on a laptop.
Clean your fans and air flows at least once a year and you will have no problems.
But this schould be done also on consoles and on desktop, but desktops wont feel the missing cooling as fast as laptops.

[Aylis]

I'll never understand why someone would choose to game on a laptop over a desktop.

I've had friends, and even dated a girl for several years who gamed almost exclusively on a laptop. I don't get how people can have an office space capable of accommodating a desktop, and still choose to go with a laptop. I can understand people who are always mobile, but most aren't.

Laptops offer less quality for more cost in almost every situation. They're rarely upgradable, and they're more fragile. I just cannot fathom why someone would choose a laptop over a desktop if they're just going to sit at a desk in their house to game.

(This rant was trigged by the FFXIV graphics are too hard on my PC forum post where someone recommended the user who can't afford a new computer to buy a laptop. They don't have money for a better PC, why would you recommend a laptop? Terrible performance/price ratio compared to a desktop).

Why....just....why do you even care what someone else does or chooses to play on....

[HyoMinPark]

I game on a laptop. I got one over a custom built rig for portability, so that I could take my computer with me whenever I’m out of town or when I go to friend’s places and the like. It’s also wonderful to be able to pick a room I want to play in on a daily basis: on nice days, I like to sit in the dining room and open the windows, enjoy the sun and warm breeze while I game away. It was also better within my budget at the time, and I didn’t know the first thing about building a rig of my own. Now that I have the money/the knowledge, I do plan to build a rig. But the laptop was the better choice at the time.

Considering my graphics card is fairly old and still kills this game in terms of performance, I don’t see an issue with the quality of my gaming experience.

Don’t see the point in ranting about why people make their own choices with regards to gaming platforms. Seems pointless to me.

[Lumivyory]

I had a desktop a very long time ago and it was a potato desktop which I replaced with a little less potato laptop. After that I would only buy laptops because I needed to take my PC with me a lot.

I had 3 laptops so far, all 3 run FFXIV fairly well, only the first one couldn't handle things like Titan EX, for example.
Each time I buy a laptop that less of a potato than my previous one and I hope to get a gaming laptop one day. I don't take my PC out as much anymore but by now I just find using a laptop more comfortable for myself.

Plus to that, I have a poor eyesight but it's not bad enough to wear glasses all the time so I was recommended not to do that. Having a laptop helps me have my screen pretty close and be able to see most of the things on my screen without shoving my face into it.
I understand that I could totally have a bigger screen for a desktop to see better but that would most likely just make an already expensive desktop even more expensive to buy and sadly I can't afford that.

[KisaiTenshi]

People do not buy laptops for higher build quality over a desktop. They do it because portability is more important to them, which is fine. Any electronics purchase such as this is always a person finding their preferred balance of Price point, Power, and Portability.

Most new laptops use SSD or NVMe hard drives, which is what dies first in most laptops. Desktops with SSD's still have delicately mounted heat sinks, and unsecured cables. The most common failure points with desktops are the cables attached to the motherboard, and the CPU heatsink being dislodged. On high end gaming systems, you also have the PCIe GPU cards being jostled out of the card slot. That is all a factor of build quality. Laptops are tightly engineered, and can take a lot more abuse now then they could even 4 years ago before SSD's were large enough to actually play games on. Thank Apple for that trend. You'd be amazed at how solid laptops are.

The most common thing broken on a laptop today is the PSU connector, and the screen because people use too small of laptop bag/backpack and someone sits/steps on it.

How do laptops hold up physically?

Has anyone ever gamed on one for like 4 hours a day over several years without any part failures?

Older laptops that had spinning hard drives and cd/dvd-roms would always die every 2 years, RAM, CPU and GPU have like 10+ years in them if you clean the fan non-aggressively every month. New laptops using oLED screens and SSD hard drives are mostly solid. Usually the hinges for the screen seize up around the 5 year mark if you're still using it, but the games of the last decade leapfrogged each other in performance requirements, so you'd normally not using a gaming laptop for more than 5 years anyway. Today there will not be any more leapfrogs in performance for a while, anything bought right now will be fairly solid for the next 5 years.

The laptop I had:
Hard drive replaced twice
RAM replaced once (upgrade)
CPU fan cleaned multiple times, but replaced once
CPU hinges seized up.

From the laptops from previous jobs:
-hard drive failures across most customer laptops, easily fixed until the shift to SATA, and then replacement parts dried up. Now we're on the NVMe SSD bandwagon.
-power cable cut/broken off inside laptop, requiring PCB replacement
-soda/water/juice/coffee/you-don't-wanna-know spilled in laptop, rendering it destroyed (most common warranty void reason)

Most enterprise laptops, likewise have cooling and hard drive issues, and those are used for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (what would be high end gaming laptops otherwise.) But Enterprise customers just wholesale replace laptops to begin with, so it's often cheaper to just replace 100+ laptops when Microsoft releases a new OS and hold onto it for 5 years.

But I'm telling you all straight up, everyone is heading to laptops, not just gamers. With businesses, they can send their staff home and they can work from home, saving fuel/energy costs, and cutting back on office space they have to lease. With gaming, you can have a reasonable machine in a tight living situation (not that I'd encourage this.)

There are downsides as well. I'm not dismissing any of those. The biggest gaming laptops (eg 17"+) are really just a desktop in a laptop chassis, and aren't as portable as you think they are. They weigh way too darn much to tow from work/class to home, and have batteries that won't last long enough to watch a movie on Netflix. The smaller 15" laptops can have the power of a mid-tier GPU, but they will sound like a jet or vacuum is running if you use them for extensive periods of time. Hence the conundrum. Even a desktop system will be loud of the GPU is maxed out, but because of the larger cooling fans, they aren't anywhere near as bad, usually.

The worst issue current laptops tends to have is the wireless functionality. If everyone is using wireless, then everyone is in competition for the bandwidth, and the farther people are away from the AP, the lower the bandwidth becomes for everyone as it tries extra hard to hear the weak wireless devices. As many cheap and mid-tier laptops do not even have Ethernet ports on them now, (WiFi only, or USB-C dongles/docks needed) this is one thing far in favor of desktops that can simply plug into an ethernet port and not have to deal with the wireless access point being saturated or bad bluetooth devices screaming over them.

[JackHatchet]

I had no idea laptops were that durable.

I just figured that if you ran them hot multiple hours a day, 7 days a week (like a dedicated gamer) that they'd burn out real fast, but seeing some people get years out of their machines despite all the stress is pretty inspiring. I have a lot more respect for laptops knowing that. I just always imagined they were portable, but limited-use computers, and had to take breaks from time to time or they'd burn out. Unlike a PC that you can leave on for days or weeks on end without ever restarting.

My work gifted me a laptop about 2 years ago, and I've honestly only ever used it maybe 3 times for work? And about 6 times for lan parties. My full-tower these days isn't nearly as portable as the mid-tower I had in highschool/college. So for a quick 6 hour session--I can suffer through a laptop. Though I still pack my own mouse and keyboard, and I cringe at using a smaller screen compared to my desktop's 30in. Now I don't complain about that laptop too much, because as a work-gift--who can complain? But if I had to pay 1,500 dollars for it of my own money. There's no freaking way I'd even come close to getting my money's worth out of it.

--------------

To the haters. I didn't ask my questions to hate on laptop users. Because laptops vs desktops isn't an 'obviously' subjective question as some people seem to think. There's a lot of logical and objective reasons for both camps. And those reasons are what I wanted to know. For example, a lot of folks started off with laptops growing up, and it became an acquired taste. That's an explaination I would have never considered had I not asked, and people not answered. And while sometimes 'sticking with something' because you grew up with it isn't always the most logical choice--I do understand it, and respect it. It's why I use an iPhone. It was my first smartphone (after a Razer), and I never gave android a chance. Now I stick with what I know best, and that's my reason. It doesn't mean I think less of other people's choices. I asked a question, because I didn't understand those choices. I have respect for everyone who answered my curiosity.

[Lumivyory]

I had no idea laptops were that durable.

I just figured that if you ran them hot multiple hours a day, 7 days a week (like a dedicated gamer) that they'd burn out real fast, but seeing some people get years out of their machines despite all the stress is pretty inspiring. I have a lot more respect for laptops knowing that. I just always imagined they were portable, but limited-use computers, and had to take breaks from time to time or they'd burn out. Unlike a PC that you can leave on for days or weeks on end without ever restarting.

I'm pretty sure if it's a high-end gaming laptop it can take at least days without restarting.

The thing with laptops is that you need to watch how much they heat up and be sure to clean them from dust and change the thermal paste at least once a year, otherwise it might heat up too much and literally burn out. Especially if you use them for gaming which makes most of them heat up more than usual.
I only had one laptop die for still unknown reason (I think motherboard died) but my oldest one lived for at least 5 years with me playing games on it all the time.

[cougarel]

Tbh i don't find this a mystery. I have both a laptop and a desktop and will switch between them if the game is more intensive , but for ffxiv it can be done on a laptop with dedicated gpu and retain 60 fps (gaming laptops with at least gtx 880m). As others have pointed , sometimes you just want to move around and still have the comfort of watching/doing your own stuff without worrying about the space and cables.
Just my 2 cents.

[Campi]

I don't understand why some people are vegans



I play ffxiv on a 15 inches laptop with bad internet and I can do every type of content, so who cares?

[CorbinDallas]

I don't understand why some people are vegans



I play ffxiv on a 15 inches laptop with bad internet and I can do every type of content, so who cares?

This pretty much sums the whole thing up. Why care?