What do YOU consider to be a Gaming Laptop? What about a good laptop?

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Question is in the title, what is a gaming laptop to you, and what is a good laptop to you?

A GAMING laptop to me has to have 3 or 4 things.

1: Big ass hard drive with good io. Mine has an SSHD, good and meets my standards.
2: Big ass screen res and needs to look good @ smaller res'. This just needs to happen
3: With good res, good GPU to drive everything
4: A not shit keyboard and mouse.

I would add 5 being ram, but I use linux and OSX on my laptops and I can have swap. I don't care as long as there is 4 GB of ram.

Now what is a GOOD laptop?
1: Good processor. I don't need some laggy cheap low-bin intel chip that costs 95% of the unit. I can go for older hardware there if I need to.
2: Good KB Mouse use, again.
3: CLEAR screen, not necessarily big.
4: BIOS. I know how it works and I can fix it if I have to.

Now, what the hell do either of these have to do with each other?

My final to you, reader, what is the first laptop you actually gave a really big shit about? Like, the first one that you tweaked so much that you spent more time making it tighter than actually using it?

I have 3, 1 in gaming, 2 in good.

Gaming: I just got my Y40-70. Hinge snapped off inside, researched what would need to be done to glue it up, got super glue, that fucker isn't coming apart. Has a good GPU, enough that I can play skyrim at 60 on battery. Thats my heavy benchmark.

Deal with it and shut up.

Ok battery, good ram, SSHD, and I need to get used to island KB's again. However I will not call it a good laptop as it doesn't have a good KB, in my opinion, it has UEFI which I don't trust in the first place, and because it has UEFI I'll never be able to patch it if something wrigles in there.

So whats a good laptop? What about the old standard business laptops?

IBM 600X: Best laptop keyboard ever. Period. Clearest screen on a laptop that age. Period. Trackpoint mouse is best mouse, Period. Has BIOS and DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE ON HOW THE BIOS IS PUT TOGETHER PLUS A UART INTO THE BIOS. THIS is a good laptop. Throw 2000 on it, update it, you have a daily.

NOT my NW8000, like you were going to assume, but.....

2006 Macbook...: Good KB, great touchpad, GREAT screen, Sata, Cheap as hell, Not BIOS, but not UEFI and a UNIX TERMINAL BUILT INTO THE EFI. THAT sirs is a fucking dream that makes me cream my pants. Parts are easy to get. Units are plentiful everywhere. These things are magic. Get 10.6.8 or something in them, or linux, and just fly.

I've been looking at laptops again for the last few months. Glad I got my Y40-70, but its lacking the standards I'm used to, which are rather high to be honest. I guess I think too far back and even if my standards are "Arcane" I still expect full functionality.

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If it can play games
Everything else comes after that lol.
I.e.
My first "gaming laptop" was an elitebook 8740w because it had a firepro that was essentially a desktop radeon 5770.

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A good laptop is a good laptop, and a powerful laptop is a powerful laptop. I kinda dislike all laptops with faster GPUs to be labeled as 'gaming' laptops and the manufacturers also design them all gamery, and if you want a powerful laptop you have to buy a 'gaming' laptop. Wth.
It's like wanting to buy a fast car, and your only option is to get one of those custom tuned ones... where's the AMGs & R8s?

Anyway an example of a good laptop I have would be the x200s - it's small, has good battery life (still after 8 years, power consumption ~5W at idle) - keyboard is great and the build quality is great.
All it's good for is web browsing and office work. Image editing in GIMP is laggy as hell but doable.
Any newer games it just isn't worth running them on such low fps.
Still, it's a notebook and not a 'gaming' laptop so it handles the jobs I do with it just fine, and classify it as a good laptop.

Another good laptop would be the y910 I've had a couple of months - it's branded as a gaming laptop yeah but reason I bought it was it's powerful enough to actually be a desktop replacement. With an i7-6820HK, 32GB RAM, a 1070, 2xNVMe + 1 SATA SSD it can handle anything I throw at it and has a perfect storage solution for my setup (linux on one nvme, win on the other, and shared storage on the sata).
Keyboard is mechanical but still low profile, appeals to me. And the colors are great after peeling the anti-glare film off from the screen.
Even tho the battery only lasts for 2 ish hours surfing the web I don't mind. As expected with a powerful machine you can't expect the battery to last. And while it's not -as- powerful as a fullblown desktop it's damn close, filling my needs in such a way I don't need a desktop PC anymore.

I can't even remember the model numbers of any shitty laptops i've had, but those would be Aspires and Inspirons. In hindsight every part of those machines was crap- and they were loud and slow... I have no Idea why I ever bought them in the first place.

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Since it's a laptop is meant to be portable so a machine in the 15" screen range for me it's pretty good. Than come the internals that must be powerful enough to do gaming and than some but should not require a massive cooling dissipation (this is more a problem that GPUs have in laptops more than CPUs), so a laptop with, for example, a GTX1060 makes it a perfect machine to work and play on without sacrificing portability. Third thing is the screen: since I have to look at it most of the time should have rasonable brightness, good resolution (1080p or more) and good colours. Fourth thing is the keyboard: a decent one is more than enough for me. Last thing is the avalability of widely used ports like full size USBs, an ethernet jack, headphones and microphone jack, HDMI, Displayport and just one Thunderbolt 3 port to be able to add high bandwith devices if needed.

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meh, my only constraints now would be:

Doesn't get to loud under load
Thunderbolt3 --> eGPU Capability
Not to bulky
Expandable/upgradable storage options

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Couple things to note here.

The Lenovo Ideapad Y series laptops are priced with specs before build quality, where business laptops (Thinkpad, Latitude etc) are priced with build quality before specs. So don't be surprised if the build quality isn't tank-like. You get what you paid for.

My Ideapad Y500 has a screen that is about to die and wasn't built like a tank, but it had really good specs for the price.
My Mid-2009 MacBook Pro didn't have top of the line specs when I bought it, but I still use it daily even though it is 7 and a half years old because it was built really well and upgradable.

So for me a Gaming laptop would really be anything with a decent CPU and dedicated GPU (no Quadro or Fire Pro). Basically a desktop replacement but with 'gaming' marketing because that is typically what you would use those specs for. To be nit-picky, a laptop from 1995 is a gaming computer as long as you like Minesweeper and Solitaire. A gaming laptop is a mix between the specs you want, and the price you are willing to pay for it.

As for a 'good' laptop, it depends entirely on what the user prioritizes. If I want specs and price to be a factor, then something like a Lenovo Ideapad Y series would be great, but don't expect build quality. If I want a really good keyboard and build quality, I may have to sacrifice specs to maintain a reasonable cost.

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A "gaming" laptop to me is something that has a decent GPU. And by decent GPU, I mean Radeon 7770 levels and upward. It should also have a halfway decent CPU and a healthy amount of (user serviceable) RAM.

A GOOD laptop for me is one that can hold its own in terms of processing power for a long time and is built to withstand commercial/business/industrial workloads and environments. I see so many consumer-grade laptops being peddled by Best Buy, Staples, etc, that are just the most flimsy pieces of trash both in terms of processing power (Celerons and Pentiums) and build quality. HP, Toshiba, Acer, even Dell and Lenovo are guilty of this.

Take any business-grade laptop from the Core 2 Duo days, open them up - they have magnesium frames, they have decent displays for their age (1280x800 or 1680x1050) with metal backplates, full-copper heatsinks, sensible and useful I/O and full-featured BIOSes. I have a dozen Core 2 Duo Thinkpads in my desk at home and ALL of them work after 8-10 years of hard working environments. Aftermarket parts are dirt-cheap for them ($30 of parts to go from barebones to fully kitted-out), they're easily user-serviceable, they're built like tanks and the Core 2 architecture has aged incredibly well - they're perfectly usable as day-to-day machines even now. My Lenovo T400 runs Linux like greased lightning on an SSD. That's what I consider to be a "good" laptop.

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Laptop:
Decent processor (what is decent will depend on what exactly you plan on doing with it; right tool for the job and all that)
An ssd (I hate having spinning platters in mobile devices. I've dealt with too many dead laptop hdds to make that mistake myself)
An ips screen, at least 1080p (4k is a bit much for a laptop, and I am tired of the horrible viewing angles of tn panels)
Decent keyboard (doesn't have to be spectacular, and I don't use the track pad for any length of time anyway, so I don't really care about that)

Gaming laptop:
Same as a regular laptop + a decent gpu. Something close to rx 470 performance preferably.

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I think the best kinds of gaming laptops are those with the lower end GPU's in them. Like the 950, 1050, or future AMD equivalents.

I don't want a big bulky laptop that sounds like a jet engine when the fans inevitably kick on.
I don't plan on playing triple A titles on Ultra quality settings on the go either.