Another feature that I find quite important is battery life. If I'm getting a gaming laptop with something half-decent in it, it's going to do double duty as my home machine as well as being a normal laptop and I want it to last all day doing normal stuff. This 3.5-4 hour battery life thing is not ok with me.

Yep, I'm sick of flashy gaming laptops. I use them for work because of the powerful hardware inside and the portability. I also use them for some infrequent gaming. Co-workers look at my laptop and assume I'm a big gamer who spends way too much time on gaming and that I have terrible aesthetic tastes.

Some of extrapolations in text with such small sample seems to be forced.

Also not everybody buys gaming laptops for gaming. My main reason for example is 3D work with gaming in second place.

@Mjoikr

Some of us are listening...

Don't understand why people keep expecting the 2 segments - business and consumer class - to unite somehow in the future. A nice sentiment for enthusiasts yes, but really it's not going to happen, given how lucrative both product lines are individually.
Besides not everyone's happy to pay the "business tax" for a few extra features like durability and security. Most people are just eager hoping to see the prices go down on the best 'bang for the buck' laptops.

I hope it will not end like "Smartphones market"

Go for more thin, go for pure gadget (wireless charging) and forget the battery and components.

Razer, Gigabyte Aero, Alienware ( not about the design truely but other services)

Manufacturers : Less is More , Make it simple (powerfull AND AFFORDABLE, think volumes of sells ^^ )

@dthrp

No Aorus laptop is elegant enough. Don't get me wrong, they are great laptops but a bit too flashy for me. Still, they are better looking than most... and design preferences vary from person to person so maybe others will agree with you.

@DavidX

The ThinkPad would be another good chassis. There is talk about a 25th Anniversary Edition. Imagine that with a GTX 1060/1070...

I have an EliteBook because it's elegant, light, came with a 3 year warranty and it's easier to upgrade than a PC. It was way too expensive for what it is but I'm ok with that. In fact I would have happily traded a bit more bulk and money for a powerful GPU. Who wants to shell 1000+ on a laptop with everything soldered on and a 1 year warranty?

All we need is a Macbook Pro or ThinkPad styled gaming machine that is durable, understated, classy and somewhat upgrade-able. 

Pre-pubescent stylings and RGB-lit crap should be reserved for the minority, based on the stats here.

Ha ha, the clear "no" to aggressive designs and rgb lighting ;-)
Yeah, people spending big bucks on laptops are not 12 year old anymore. I wonder why many manufacturers have not realized this already. Actually my main criteria for choosing my laptop after price/performance ratio was "the least ugly design".
Make a classy XPS/macbook/surface like powerfull machine with decent pricing and it will sell like hotcakes. You can put a discrete gamer logo if you want a bit of segmentation.

This poll and article was a great idea btw. nice work
 

@mihai:
Gigabyte Aorus. They make some great laptops.

Wish Thinkpad laptops had a gaming grade Max-Q GPU...

I would love a 14-15" Windows laptop designed around a chassis like the 2011-2012 MacBook Pro 15. It had a simple aluminum design but with space for a big battery and cooling. It had discrete graphics, upgradable components and enough ports. All of that without that much weight. Imagine one of those with the latest and greatest from Intel, a Max-Q NVidia GTX, 1080p or 1440p display, m.2 NVMe  + 2.5" HDD (maybe support for that 5TB Seagate 2.5" 15mm drive so we can get lots of storage on the cheap), Thunderbolt 2 upgraded to Thunderbolt 3 and that's about it. I can hardly think of a better laptop. Do you? Razer came very close with the Blade but still made it too thin and therefore hard to cool, soldered the RAM and dropped support for 2.5" HDDs.

From the data, I can only suppose that the main reason why manufacturers are offering aggressive and flashy designs for their gaming laptops is some kind of desperate attempt to differentiate their designs from that of their peers ?  Because it is not due to consumer demand!

Someone should forward this survey data to them and inform them that most seem to prefer toned-down designs that are discreet and classy. 

Great job, you discovered hot water! Now go to the manufacturers and tell them that even a 12 years old boy is ashamed to carry around their led-lit, 10 pound, black and red monstrosity!

Finally... designs like the gigabyte p34g small., powerful.. discrete designed notebooks are being validated by the survey and notebook reviews praising neon lit angular form designs as the essense of gaming as severely misguided.

Its simple really,  if you have an expensive powerful notebook you are generally not a child and your are more than likely also going to use it for seriously demanding work , video, graphics, 3d modelling etc etc.

Hopefully we will never see another Notebookcheck reviewer praising RGB backlites as important criteria in rating a notebook..