Desktops take up a lot more space than a laptop, need a desk to rest on, and can only be used in the dorm room on the desk (aka the place of infinite temptation and study distractions) while theoretically even a DTR laptop can be taken to the library (aka the place parents hope their students are when they call them to check up and they get the voicemail). These parents have good reasons to buy these monster machines, and young college age nerds have a good reason to demand them.
You need a desk to use an 8.5-11 lbs laptop, a library desk.
Your entire argument only works for mostly tech illiterate/ignorant parents. Why? Because no parent who is smart would subject their son or daughter to carrying an 8.5-11 lbs laptop
+ their study materials on a daily basis. This is simply not good for your spine/back unless the person is built. In other words a smart parent would want their child to focus as much as possible on studies which means have as much energy as possible throughout the day between classes. Carrying more weight is not helping achieve those goals.
Further, a tech savvy parent would know that such laptop has horrendous battery lief which means their son/daughter will be subjected to chasing wall outlets in college/university where in many instances not every single student has access to his own power plug outside of the classroom.
In other words, once you start working in groups and having group projects, most students book study rooms, and not just for 2-3 hours but sometimes for 5-8 hours. Small group study rooms in most universities do not have 5-8 outlets. Now imagine carrying an 8.5 lbs laptop, knowing in advance that in 3 hours you can't do any work on it? What are you going to do tell your study group "Oh sorry guys, I have to go home?" Take up their charge slot every 2-3 hours?
Smart students and parents know all of this and plan ahead. That's why any student who is serious about succeeding is going to prioritize weight and battery life so you spend as little time as possible worrying about battery life and straining your back.
Also, what kind of a parent would agree that a $2500-3000 laptop is required to succeed in university? Modern smart adult know that even smartphones and tablets and laptops from 5 years ago with SSDs are not held back by their CPU/GPU performance for MS Excel, PowerPoint, Word, etc.
Maybe a PHD student needs CUDA and insane horsepower but I don't see 18-22 year old college students suddenly needing a $2500 GTX980 laptop to succeed. Again, if my son/daughter tried to sell me on the idea that they need a gaming laptop for university with a GTX980, that would never fly because it's not needed. If they are an engineer, chances are they are better off getting a workstation with FirePro or Quadro.
Most people here are completely narrow-minded. They think that, if something has no value to them, it doesn't have value to anyone.
I don't think some of you truly understood the point I was making. I am all for putting GTX980 into a laptop. You know a LAPTOP, not a briefcase. Only Gigabyte with its Aorus X7 DT line even attempted to make a proper GTX980 gaming
laptop.
Their
X7 Pro line with dual 970M SLI had these specs:
22.9mm thick
3kgs (6.6 lbs)
17 inches
4x DIMM slots
G-Sync
3x mSATA SSDs (this is probably going to be upgraded to M.2 slots for the next model)
The competitors are bringing out 8.5-11 lbs "laptops" with 45-55mm thick chassis. Sorry,
those are
not real laptops....they are briefcases with a screen attached to them. They are way beyond the point of reasonable mobility in terms of their thickness and weight. It's not any major accomplishment to shove a 150W TDP GPU inside a thick 45-55mm gigantic case and add childish glowing key lights as marketing bling. The market should be moving towards getting GTX980 to work in thinner and lighter laptops -- that's actual progress. Adding a 980 inside an 8.5-11 lbs laptop is just an ordinary course of business, not innovation.
That's my point. Thus far, only the Aorus X7 even attempted this.
So in reality, consumer criticism towards heavy, low battery briefcases would actually improve the laptop market if laptop makers focused on these priorities. Accepting 8.5-11 lbs luggage isn't doing anything to change that.
---------------------
The exciting part about the desktop 980 is ~ 35% higher performance over 980M and 2X the performance over the 880M (
Source). Since Kepler 880M came out
March 12, 2014, it means that NV doubled mobile dGPU performance with Maxwell in barely more than 1.5 years.
Incredible.
Speaking of the Aorus X7 DT,
"In our hands-on session, we were given an MSI GT72 GTX 980 notebook to play with – the large one upon which the Fangbook is based – and achieved an offset OC of +180MHz with zero effort. We'll test full OC potential once a unit is in our hands for testing. Under benchmark load (using Unigen's Heaven), the overclocked GT72 GTX 980 notebook was sitting in the 80-85C range; we're unsure of what ambient was in the hotel room (likely ~20C), but that's still a fully reasonable temperature for an overclocked laptop GPU. Smaller notebooks, like the
sub-1” Aorus X7 DT, were still hitting around the ~82C range (not overclocked) with the GPU under full load – not bad for a desktop part crammed into a very thin notebook." (
Source)
Looking awesome.
Surprisingly the most powerful 980 SLI laptop doesn't appear to have GSync
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