What you explicitly stated here 
eg that you want to use it for travel.
In the 16" category, you will mostly see “desktop replacement” models, mainly for gaming. This is just a feature of the market, not an intrinsic technological constraint, but that is how it is.
Again, I would consider 15". That said, matte screens are unfortunately out of fashion at the moment and are harder to find.
if internet benchmarks are any indication that is about the level of an old RTX 2080 (no ti no super). certainly more the entry level end of the spectrum for serious GPU compute. personally i might be unhappy with this card. i’ll also second your conclusion about video ram, 4GB for instance is not enough to work with 50MP images in vkdt. raw video might even work… at least magic lantern MLV is so low res that it’s no problem. MCRAW/smartphone footage is usually low-resish too (more like 4k, not much in terms of raw photography).
RTX2000 might be interesting, but is the workstation line. usually means plenty of VRAM, sometimes less compute power because they can work in servers for weeks and months, and hopelessly overpriced.
and yes, matte screen please for me too 
On Geizhals.at, I get exactly 2 laptops with 15 inch matte dcip3 screen, and both are way over 3k eur.
I would go with an LG Gram, as recommended by @psalm19pix above. I would get the plain vanilla version around €1k, then upgrade the SSD and the RAM. Apparently they are highly servicable (but check this yourself). My understanding is that it has a matte screen.
What you will not get in this bundle is a dedicated graphics card. The thunderbolt 4 ports should allow you to connect one in an external enclosure — not something I would take with me when travelling, but ideal for the desktop.
Sounds kinda interesting but I would need the GPU on travel as well.
Well the hp zbook has a weaker gpu and cpu, but it’s very lightweight, pretty and I could just go to the store and bring it home… no need to order and wait. It’s also targeted at creators, not so much gamers, and it’s also cheaper than most of the others.
This is the only laptop that I could have a look at with my own eyes so far, and check it’s weight.
On the other hand, it’s almost too lightweight to be a more or less useful machine for doing real work (writing, testing software, compiling and content creating), and replacing a desktop when not at home.
Guys, this is a really difficult decision… too bad that the Lenovo thinkbook weighs more than 2 kg.
There’s just no perfect solution. It’s a triangle between speed, portability, and price, and you get to choose two of these three. The result is always going to be a compromise.
That said, I think you could compromise on the speed side of things: My recent performance analyses have shown recent CPUs (with LPDDR5X memory!!) to be quite capable. So much so, that they outperformed dedicated GPUs in editing tasks (but not export) in Darktable.
If I were in your shoes, I’d look into the latest AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops, or indeed ≥M2 MacBooks. I know these would be plenty fast for my editing needs, and not nearly as power-hungry, bulky, or expensive as a dedicated GPU.
I would say that also repairability/upgradeability plays a huge role. Back in the days I would for example buy ThinkPads, because you could repair everything on your own (that has changed in the meantime…)
Yep… I think that a mix of a lightweight laptop plus portable monitor and external GPU may be a solution too. Of course, you would have to carry three things but everything can be used very versatile.
i am going to claim this is more due to the dt implementation than the hardware though.
That’s probably true. Nevertheless, the mentioned AMD chipset has quite a capable GPU as well, and should be more than adequate for a better-optimized software such as VKDT (or indeed, Lightroom et al).
Please do respond if you disagree, I’m highly interested in how VKDT is developing.
I think I just realized that one important drawback of this Asus device is the fact that it uses ddr4 memory instead of ddr5, so that’s probably tha main reason why it’s significantly cheaper than the others.
just to double check: you were talking about the ryzen 300 laptops with the integrated radeon 890M gpu? for a laptop certainly interesting. i think it should run vkdt (benchmarks seem to say it’s on par with a laptop 1070/a bit better than 1650Ti on a laptop was, and i’m assuming it can steal a big chunk of the host memory, which would be important). of course there are always more intense tasks that will not be fun to do on such devices. should be fine for standard day to day raw development though.
amd has really interesting gpu devices, even if they refuse to do high end and are maybe a bit on the power hungry side.
I would be tempted to do that. IMO +/- 30% scores of whatever benchmark on paper are pretty irrelevant (manufacturers game them anyway) and will not affect your user experience to that extent.
FWIW, I tend to prefer to buy second-tier laptops like that, especially if the savings are significant.
My laptops tend to degrade and die within 2–3 years on average (the battery loses capacity, thermal paste needs to be replaced after 1–2 years if you are using the CPU heavily, dust and particles get in the keyboard, etc). All of these are problems I could of course fix, but it is rarely worth it.
I have a 3yo laptop and my battery is already down to 54% of capacity. I don’t like that new electronics is pretty much disposable and fixing is often not worth it, it won’t be like new.
This is especially true for batteries, where you just can’t tell how much capacity is your replacement unit going to have. You may sometimes end up with a unit worse than your old one (personal experience).
Yes, that’s what I mean. It seems that this system has a considerably faster GPU than the rival Intel and Snapdragon systems (for “ultrabook” laptops). But I’ve seen the AMD system paired with an Nvidia GPU as well, so it’s not likely to compete with desktop-class chips directly.
Recently replaced the battery of my laptop and it was fine. And that was a no-name one (70€) since the manufacturer was out of stock.
Other things that die in laptop:
I can confirm, my laptop suffers keyboard problems as well. Keyboard replacement is a bit scary to be honest, as the laptop motherboard has to be taken out (if I happen to find the keyboard specifically for my model, so far I haven’t found any in stock).
My laptop runs hot, but I’m really not sure that the thermal paste is faulty. I can’t really compare the performance and thermals when it was new, but since it’s very slim (~ 7mm thick around the CPU, thinner towards the touch pad), i don’t think it can handle a 35W intel 11th gen CPU (it can do about 26W long-term at 91°C average). It can do 35W as well, but only for like 10 seconds, then it starts throttling.
It is thunderbolt-4 and the connector is USB-C compatible.
Hmm, what do you mean by not always smooth? Something like video or UI lag/freeze during the switch or something? I might get such laptop in the future so I’d like to know.
I wonder, are dedicated GPUs too power hungry for common tasks like video playback?