The decision was made, and I settled on a gaming laptop.
It ultimately came down to momentum and laziness. My last device was a big, heavy, powerful notebook that I turned into the center of my digital life, and so I followed it up with a big, heavy, powerful notebook that I will turn into the center of my digital life. Time will tell if this was the right call. One thing that has definitely changed since 2011 is that cloud computing has made it so that so much more of the services we access and tasks we run can be performed with nothing more than a web browser. Whether or not this impacts just how much computing power I will actually need is yet to be seen.
I chose a 15-inch Dell G7. This particular model has all the hardware I wanted in the form factor I was looking for. I have seen are other variations of this laptop that have bigger monitors, or have a bigger SSD + worse video card, but this one checked all the boxes off for me.
