Some people might look at the death of Moore's Law, Intel's 10nm troubles, and Nvidia's highly resistible 2019 mobile-RTX lineup and think that the notebook business is in trouble. I think it might be the best thing that's happened to the industry in years.

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It used to be that you needed to buy a new laptop every year or two if you wanted to continue playing the latest games or running the most cutting-edge software. CPUs and GPUs were getting faster and more power efficient with each iteration, and it wasn't uncommon to see anywhere from 20-100% performance increases in certain use-cases.

The jump from Nvidia's Maxwell to Pascal finally put equivalent power of a desktop Nvidia card into a laptop with lower TDPs than the previous generation; Braswell (5th gen) to Skylake (6th gen) saw huge increases in integrated graphics performance as well as some impressive efficiency improvements. In the past two years, we've seen major leaps forward due to core count increases (if not efficiency): Dual-core 7th gen U-series saw their core-counts doubled with Kaby Lake-R, while Intel's 7th gen H-series went from 4 to 6 cores with Coffee Lake (8th gen) — unsurprisingly, multi-core performance increased accordingly.

But in the last year, we've seen the major players, Nvidia and Intel, struggle to offer compelling upgrades: Except for some highly suspect articles telling consumers to "just buy it", very few in tech media could honestly recommend upgrading from Pascal to Turing. As popular YouTuber Dave Lee iterated not once, but twice in video, RTX laptops just don't seem to offer the performance increase over the 2-year-old Pascal to make them worth the significant price premium. Intel's struggles moving from 14nm to 10nm are well-documented, as delays have meant that Intel has been on the 14nm process for an astounding 5 years now.

It wasn't until Dell's XPS 13 9343 and XPS 15 9550 dropped in 2015 that the major OEMs had anything resembling the slick unibody designs of Apple — but those designs have been languishing for 4 years now, seeing the same drop-in hardware upgrades year after year. Manufacturers can no longer just throw in the standard iterative upgrade from one generation to the next and expect them to sell like hotcakes.