Old laptop features that we hope will never come back

During the early days of 4K laptops in 2017, many manufacturers were scrambling to acquire 4K panels to advertise the then eye-popping 4K dream. Some of these panels, however, would utilize dedicated white subpixels in addition to RGB and so they were not "true" 4K. The number of pixels per row would be fewer than the 3840 standard. We've compiled an incomplete list of models sporting RGBW panels here.

Fortunately, these "faux K" panels would quickly die off by the time 2019 rolled around. We've yet to run into any laptops with RGBW subpixels ever since.

Walk through the laptop aisle of a Best Buy or Walmart ten years ago and you would absolutely find models on display equipped with integrated DVD or Blu-ray drives and primary HDDs. While optical and mechanical drives have their uses, they would occupy significant volume inside of laptops where space was already tight. By removing optical drives altogether and migrating to smaller M.2 SSD form factors, manufacturers were able to increase the sizes of batteries and cooling solutions for better runtimes and performance, respectively.

While there are still plenty of laptops shipping with proprietary barrel AC adapters, it's clear that OEMs are currently moving away from specialized chargers in favor of the universal USB-C standard. Gone are the days of losing your one Lenovo charger that only worked on one specific laptop as now even most USB-C chargers that ship with smartphones are able to charge the latest Ultrabooks.

Gaming laptops still require bulky proprietary chargers due to the inefficient 100 W USB-C limit, but even this will soon change as 240 W USB-C adapters are beginning to hit the market.

Sometimes features that make sense on a desktop PC don't always translate well to a laptop form factor. On paper, doubling the GPU in a laptop should sound like a gamer's dream. In reality, however, the entailing fan noise, temperatures, power consumption, and other design sacrifices necessary to support two GPUs would muddle the laptop gaming experience. Furthermore, SLI laptops would quickly become obsolete as newer titles would begin favoring single GPU optimizations over SLI configurations. AMD Dual Graphics, which combined the performances of two asymmetric GPUs, would suffer a similar fate with its lack of driver and developer support. 

Gigabyte Aorus was one of the biggest supporters of SLI laptops with their most recent SLI model being the 2017 Aorus X9 equipped with two GeForce GTX 1070 GPUs. Though still a fast machine all things considered, it just didn't make sense for the vast majority of gamers especially when considering its launch price of nearly $4000 USD.

Distinguishing between a cheap laptop versus an expensive one was very easy back in the day as most cheaper models would utilize TN panels instead of IPS. Nowadays, there are essentially no more models shipping with TN options aside from a few outliers. TN panels were notorious for their limited viewing angles and generally poorer colors than their IPS counterparts. Once you experience IPS, there's no turning back to TN.