Why are they so rare?

- very heavy & bulky, so don't fit many 'laptop' use cases
- very expensive compared to desktops with similar specs
- still a small screen and crappy keyboard connected together for poor ergonomics

A lot of people who might want one can't afford it, and many who can afford prefer smaller, more portable executive-stype laptops. That makes them a niche market.

That said: you say nobody makes them anymore, but a quick check shows current models by Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG, Medion (Aldi), MSI, Razer and Skikk (who?). Looks like a pretty well-serviced niche. Why do you think that wasn't the case?

user33331 wrote on 2023-01-04, 11:55:

Hello Any rough estimate numbers about how many pcs of larger laptop models are manufactured ? Always problem with 17,3" laptops […]
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Hello
Any rough estimate numbers about how many pcs of larger laptop models are manufactured ?
Always problem with 17,3" laptops when buying: keyboards, caddies or other spare parts.
( Starting from >2022 companies sell only mid size solution 16" laptops like: lenovo P16 and HP Fury 16. )

Is it like professional cameras (Nikon, Canon) that they manufacture them only in 10,000-50,000 pcs ?
I doubt total sale numbers of 17,3" don't go higher than >100,000 pcs.
Some replacement and add-on parts seem very hard to find.

Anyone work in sales department to show some production numbers ?
Why 17,3" is so rare ?

Coincidentally, quite a few 18" laptop models were announced at CES 2023 yesterday. Looks like this is going to be the year of large screen laptops. Acer, Alienware, Asus, and Razer all announced an 18" model. Probably more to come.

years ago 18.4 use to be a common size u could get in gaming laptops. most of the 17.3 inch ones are gaming machines i don't think maybe people are buying the 17.3 inch ones beyond gamers. i doubt many people are buying that size for business or school they would want the smaller size for easy carrying.

I use a 17.3" laptop daily and my wife does the same, my goal is a screen of an adequate size and low energy consumption. The usual use is browsing the internet and some light games.
In some things size really matters. 😀
But it is also true that my laptop weighs only 2.2kg.

You may also want to check OEMs like Clevo who make the chassis for other companies. About 10 years ago I bought one of their high end 17" laptops with (iirc, a GTX 675mx), quad core i7 mobile, 16gb ram etc. It was pretty pricey.

In the end I didn't really use it as a laptop other than on the sofa as others have said: too big, heavy, hot and power hungry. Some of those issues will have lessened these days with more modern components, but a 17" screen and case is always going to have significant weight/bulk issues over traditional 13/14/15" screens.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-04, 17:58:

Why are they so rare?

- very heavy & bulky, so don't fit many 'laptop' use cases
- very expensive compared to desktops with similar specs

I have to disagree with you here because with most recent (2020 onwards) 17" laptops, this is simply not the case.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-04, 17:58:

- very heavy & bulky, so don't fit many 'laptop' use cases

Some 17's may be on the bulky side, but current performance 17" gaming machines like the Asus ROG Strix and Lenovo Legion series are actually rather compact considering the display size. As for weight, that depends more on the size of the battery and the quality of the cooling system, as these two components are the heavyest components of a laptop.

A good example here are the Asus TUF A15 FA506IV - a mid-end 15.6" machine and it's 17" counterpart, the A17 FA706IV. They come in several configurations (60wh or 90wh battery, with or without a SATA drive bay) but are both configured with a Ryzen 4800 and an RTX 2060. Personally, I've owned the 15" FA506, but had the chance to play around with the 17" version, the FA706, and I have to say, apart from the size, the weight is about the same. Both machines were configured with the large 90wh battery and no SATA drive bay, both had the ryzen 4800h and the RTX 2060. I was expecting the 17" model to have better cooling, but it did not. In fact, taking apart the 17" model revealed the exact same (mediocre) heatpipes, with the only difference being the fact that the 17" model used slightly longer heatpipes for the GPU side of the cooler so as to fit the larger case. The motherboards look the same between the two laptops, with on-motherboard ports mounted to the left side of the case, and a ribbon cable + extra PCB for the I/O on the right. Because of this the only difference I can spot between the 17 and 15" versions is the length of said ribbon cable.

I currently use a 17" Asus Strix Advantage G713QY witch I bought in autumn 2021 and I've been lugging that around whenever I need to. It is heavyer then my old FA506, but not by much, and it's rather compact for a 17" machine. For me at least, the extra bit of bulk is offset by the larger screen. The laptop will fit in most backpacks, including most designed for a 16" laptop.

Older machines are another story tough... In 2015 I owned a laptop I remember fondly - a 17" ROG G751JY which was a bulky boy. Because of the cooling system's design, it would only fit into some backpacks, those designed for large 17" gaming machines. It was also quite heavy - both the laptop itself and the power brick. Said power brick needed to come with because unlike my Strix G713 which gets up to 8-8.5h of battery, meaning I can leave my power brick at home most of the time, the G751 could only manage 3-3.5h at best.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-04, 17:58:

- very expensive compared to desktops with similar specs

Again, I have to disagree. In 2015 I payed around 1100 euro for the GTX980M (equivalent to the desktop GTX970) equipped G751. A well made custom built desktop (4th gen i7, 8gb of ram, GTX 970) with a similar configuration cost about as much, more if you add in peripherals. On the other hand, you do get better performance out of a desktop due to higher TDP parts and much much better cooling. Not to mention nvidia and AMD misleadingly name their mobile GPUs - two examples being the GTX 980M, witch has the exact same core count and memory configuration as the desktop GTX 970, or the AMD Radeon 6800M, witch is in fact a binned RX 6700M, but I did take these factors into account when considering what to buy.

Things took a turn for the worse during the pandemic and mining boom. The FA506IV I owned in that period cost me about as much as A SINGLE DESKTOP RTX 2060!!! Prices for GPUs were so bad that buying a laptop was cheaper than buying a GPU alone.... Same story with my G713QY, which comes with am RX 6800M. Back when I got the laptop I payed around 1500 euro for it, while the equivalent graphics card (the desktop RX 6700M) was either out of stock or cost in excess of 1400 euro in my country.

And yes, the FA506 is a 15" laptop, but the 17" version I wanted was never in stock, apart from the 60wh battery + RTX 2060 or 90wh + GTX 1660 versions neither of which interested me as I wanted the big battery + big GPU.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-04, 17:58:

- still a small screen and crappy keyboard connected together for poor ergonomics

^^^ This. So much this. ^^^ Regardless of how large the laptop is, I still find the ergonomics terrible. The screen is too small and way to low. I used to work on my 15" FA506 with an external monitor and keyboard when at home, and if I needed to do any prolonged work on it in the field, I'd always get terrible neck cramps and eye strain. To mitigate this, I began carrying around a compact wireless keyboard and would put the laptop on top of whatever objects I could find (books, boxes, whatever I could put on a desk to raise the screen to eye level) just so I could work on the bloody thing for more than 30mins - that would aliviate hand and neck issues, but the eye strain is still there.

WITCH IS WHY I OPTED FOR A 17" LAPTOP.

The 17" versions are a bit easier on my eyes, but again, in the field I use whatever I can to raise the machine to eye level, since the 17" screen despite being more comfortable is still insufficient for ergonomics.

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-05, 09:26:

[...] […]
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[...]

Some 17's may be on the bulky side, but current performance 17" gaming machines like the Asus ROG Strix and Lenovo Legion series are actually rather compact considering the display size. As for weight, that depends more on the size of the battery and the quality of the cooling system, as these two components are the heavyest components of a laptop.

[...]

I currently use a 17" Asus Strix Advantage G713QY witch I bought in autumn 2021 and I've been lugging that around whenever I need to. It is heavyer then my old FA506, but not by much, and it's rather compact for a 17" machine. For me at least, the extra bit of bulk is offset by the larger screen. The laptop will fit in most backpacks, including most designed for a 16" laptop.

I'm not comparing to smaller gaming laptops, I'm comparing to laptops that are actually designed with mobility in mind, like the Lenovo T470 I'm typing this on. 14", 1.8kg with extra battery module and 14h runtime using that. No it's not going to run Cyberpunk (if I want that I have my desktop), but it does just fine with DOSbox helping me while away empty hours while on the road. On that same road I wouldn't be wanting to lug a 3kg monstrosity (which is what the G713QY weighs according to spec) that runs dry after 9h on a similar load. I do have to admit that that is an impressive battery life for something with these specs.

And no, this is patently obviously not comparing like for like, but that's the whole point: for a lot of people (including me), what they take on the road with them needs to be geared primarily towards practical use on the road.

[...]

Again, I have to disagree. [...] Same story with my G713QY, which comes with am RX 6800M. Back when I got the laptop I payed around 1500 euro for it, while the equivalent graphics card (the desktop RX 6700M) was either out of stock or cost in excess of 1400 euro in my country.

The semiconductor supply squeeze is hardly a 'normal' situation. If you wanted very high-end chips, you either needed to sell a kidney to pay scalpers, or buy pre-built systems from manufacturers with pre-agreed deals with GPU manufacturers. That worked for desktops as well as for laptops.

But let's look at the situation now and that G713QY. It would cost EUR 1850 if I were to buy it locally now. That gets me an RX6800M, Ryzen 9 5900HX, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD. Now, destop RX6700XT would cost me EUR 440, Ryzen 7 5700X (basically identical to 5900HX) EUR 210, 16GB 3200MT/s DDR4 EUR 55, a decent B550 motherboard about EUR 100 and 1TB NVMe SSD EUR 75. Add in EUR 100 for a good PSU and EUR 75 for a decent case and we're at EUR 1055. To be fully equivalent we need to add monitor, keyboard and mouse - you can go completely wild here, but EUR 350 will definitely get decent stuff at least comparable to what's on the laptop. Without cutting corners on quality or re-using components from previous builds (both of which are options), we're still only at EUR 1405, so still EUR 450 cheaper than the laptop. All prices from http://tweakers.net/pricewatch by the way.

[...] […]
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[...]

^^^ This. So much this. ^^^ Regardless of how large the laptop is, I still find the ergonomics terrible. The screen is too small and way to low. I used to work on my 15" FA506 with an external monitor and keyboard when at home, and if I needed to do any prolonged work on it in the field, I'd always get terrible neck cramps and eye strain. To mitigate this, I began carrying around a compact wireless keyboard and would put the laptop on top of whatever objects I could find (books, boxes, whatever I could put on a desk to raise the screen to eye level) just so I could work on the bloody thing for more than 30mins - that would aliviate hand and neck issues, but the eye strain is still there.

WITCH IS WHY I OPTED FOR A 17" LAPTOP.

The 17" versions are a bit easier on my eyes, but again, in the field I use whatever I can to raise the machine to eye level, since the 17" screen despite being more comfortable is still insufficient for ergonomics.

Laptop designers, particularly for the big ones like this, really should make the screen detachable or - better - on an extending pole or something so that you can do this without external hardware.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-05, 13:01:

The semiconductor supply squeeze is hardly a 'normal' situation. If you wanted very high-end chips, you either needed to sell a kidney to pay scalpers, or buy pre-built systems from manufacturers with pre-agreed deals with GPU manufacturers. That worked for desktops as well as for laptops.

Every pre-built desktop with high end gpu was out of stock or grossly overpriced compared similar laptops. Scalpers here would buy whole lots of pre-builts, remove the GPU which they sold for as much as they payed for the whole system and then sell the leftovers as a "budget gaming PC" with some severely underpowered GPU like a RX 550 or just part it out and effectively double their money. Cunts.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-05, 13:01:

Laptop designers, particularly for the big ones like this, really should make the screen detachable or - better - on an extending pole or something so that you can do this without external hardware.

That would be awesome, but the "put the laptop on top of random crap and use an external keyboard and mouse" works as well.

dionb wrote on 2023-01-05, 13:01:

But let's look at the situation now and that G713QY. It would cost EUR 1850 if I were to buy it locally now. That gets me an RX6800M, Ryzen 9 5900HX, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD. Now, destop RX6700XT would cost me EUR 440, Ryzen 7 5700X (basically identical to 5900HX) EUR 210, 16GB 3200MT/s DDR4 EUR 55, a decent B550 motherboard about EUR 100 and 1TB NVMe SSD EUR 75. Add in EUR 100 for a good PSU and EUR 75 for a decent case and we're at EUR 1055. To be fully equivalent we need to add monitor, keyboard and mouse - you can go completely wild here, but EUR 350 will definitely get decent stuff at least comparable to what's on the laptop. Without cutting corners on quality or re-using components from previous builds (both of which are options), we're still only at EUR 1405, so still EUR 450 cheaper than the laptop. All prices from http://tweakers.net/pricewatch by the way.

The 5900hx is actually a binned 5700g (or the 5700g is a low-bin 5900hx???)- on board iGPU, PCI-E 3.0 and half the L3 cache (16mb). In theory the 5700X you included in your configuration would be faster - double the L3 cache, higher TDP, better cooling even with an AMD stock cooler and so on.

I agree completely with your parts list. Right now in my country the G713QY can be had for ~8250 lei tax included witch comes to about 1672e for the version with 32GB of ram and a 1.5TB M2 SSD (witch is the only version I can find in stock here). My machine came with half the ram and half the storage.

For 1650e you can build a kick-ass desktop PC that will be faster, but - lack portability. Out of curiosity I looked at the invoices for a desktop I built right before Christmas 2022:

- Ryzen 5700g (the 5700x was not in stock, the 5800x is WAY overpriced here and the 5600x costs the same as the 5700g) (1200 lei). I do plan on building a media center PC later on, so if the 5700x comes back in stock I might swap the 5700g for one of those and use the G in a mITX build or with a tiny barebone from Asus or Asrock
- 16gb of 3600MHz corsair DDR4 (320 lei)
- Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite (520 lei)
- thermalright ARO-04 cooler (320 lei)
- a spacious mATX case that accommodates a large cooler and large video cards (Chieftec CI-02B-OP) (250 lei)
- Corsair 1200HX PSU (920 lei)
- Powercolor RX 6900XT Red Devil (4200 lei)
- 1TB Kingston M2 SSD (420 lei)
----------------
8150 lei / 1656 euro witch like your configuration is faster than the G731QY. No room for peripherals tough...

Thing is you could not build such a machine in my country in autumn 2021 for 1600 euro. 6900XT's were over 2000 euro here with overclocked custom versions like the Red Devil or Sapphire Toxic costing around 2500e... you can get a decent second-hand car for that amount of money here, so I had to pass. Not to mention I'm from a generation that remembers high end and mid-high end GPUs used to cost 300-400$. Hell, the Geforce 4 Ti4200 could be had for 320$ at launch. My first mid-high end GPU ever - bought new, was a 7950GT from XFX (I still have it) and that set me back about 220$.... the first true high end GPU I ever bought new was a 8800GTX from EVGA and she cost me around 320$ if I remember correctly... and I was blown away by the performance leap from the 7950 and X1950XT's I was messing around with. Now stuff like this breaks the bank.

This is actually the first brand new desktop PC I build in years. Since 2017 I think and that's a bit sad for me, since I used to be very enthusiastic about building, modifying and upgrading my desktop PC as soon as I could. Recent hardware prices tough.... with prices like this, I'll probably be holding on to this build for over 5 years.

There are far more 14 and 15.6-inch panels manufactured than the 17.3-inch panels and the panel selection to choose from is thousands of models vs a few hundred models. From a business standpoint, offering a 17.3-inch display isn't very practical in the regular market anymore, which is why that size has been relegated to gaming/workstation builds. Also, the smaller sizes tend to have shared accessories or overlap of accessories, making them easier and more profitable to offer to the masses, while the large sizes have their own stuff.

Well, I see quite a few 17-inch laptops for sale that are not gaming, at least I wouldn't say that an I3 without a dedicated graphics card can be considered gaming. With a simple Google search, in the first result this appears: https://support.hp.com/es-es/document/c08080993
I would not say that its weight and battery life are so bad.

17" notebooks is unique that cost is higher than rest of typical 15" and below either new or used. Also when one needs parts, especially LCD panel is expensive. If not typical Dell, Lenovo or HP, even more difficult to source parts.

Also too big honestly.

Cheers,

Back when the standard aspect ratio changed from 16:10 to 16:9, 17" laptops were the only low-end/midrange options available with a usable screen resolution. For some incredibly stupid reason, 15.6" displays with a higher resolution than 1366x768 were only available on workstation-class laptops, and there weren't many programs and websites that would scale down to such a low resolution (even in 2011).

I never noticed 17" laptops becoming less common. I still prefer 15-16" laptops (16" is actually 16:10 aspect ration instead of 16:9) as a balance between portability and readability, but 17" screens are even easier to read.