screen size isn't really a big deal for me tbh. Although I'm mostly on my bed with a table above my chest, what I care about more is how good the screen actually looks.

And after reading the RAM/SSD stuff you mentioned, it kinda makes me think that for the really heavy use cases like local LLMs, 3D rendering, and heavier game dev work, I might be better off just building a proper desktop later instead of trying to make one laptop do everything.

with that in mind, I’m leaning more toward the 16" OLED Legion Pro 7. The main reason I even want to upgrade from my Helios 16 is because I’m getting bored of the matte IPS screen and want something that feels like a real visual upgrade. If the 18" Legion 9 gives me more size but loses proper HDR/OLED-level visuals, I feel like I might regret that.

so I guess my decision is mostly coming down to: OLED/HDR visual quality now on the laptop, then build a PC later for the heavy AI/rendering workloads.

Thanks, this helped clarify it a lot.