But the laptop clocks were ALWAYS much lower than desktop counterparts, even the Pascal ones. Maybe not 50%, but 20-30% easily. Anyway, this is those bullsh*t ultra-thin "gaming" laptops. I say if anyone's stupid enough to buy an ultra-thin laptop for gaming then they sorta deserve it xD

That may be the case for ppl that know the hardware and market. But if you're talking about a parent that want's to buy his/her kid a gaming laptop they could easily be duped into buying it and I couldn't blame them.

This is definitely a bigger variation than we've had previously, and this isn;t necessarily about desktop vs laptop but variants within even a single laptop GPU

I agree, the variation is too much. But it begs the questions of whether you actually DO get to enjoy that higher clock during a sustained (I.E.: Gaming) load. I'd rather see a lower clock on paper that is sustained than a higher clock that lasts 2 minutes until the laptop heats up and starts throttling. Plus, what about the thermal designs of these laptops? We're talking ultra-thin garbage here and my experience tells me that they cool poorly no matter what, but there's still variation and tolerances. Some components may tolerate a higher temp and power draw, some laptops have bigger batteries and bricks that provide more juice - isn't such variation then reflected here?

I've hurt a few horror stories then some of the newer ones actually melt within a few weeks if they're used for heavy gaming lol

That's probably why the GPUs are defaulted to such low clocks then xD That being said - the tech industry is wacky! We've got phones with too much power that you can never use due to heat. We have laptops with too much power that you can't use due to heat. We have messed up naming. Flops. Exclusivity. Software getting arbitrarily tied to hardware or other software (like the dicks at Adobe who insist you must update Windows before you can update their stupid software)... It's wacky, man...

now sure how I spelled 'heard' hurt but there we go. yeah I get the impression that laptop makers don't have a great deal of time between them finding out mobile GPUs and then manufacturing the designs, which can end up very problematic. I'm sure they think these laptops will be okay to use long-term but they can't have much time to test that

I think the manufacturers have a different definition of long-term than most ppl. Long term for me is 10+ years with everything running 24/7 all on max.