Why are laptops getting bigger and heavier again? Blame VR.

LAS VEGAS -- Despite declining PC sales, laptops have made serious progress over the last few years.

Apple's MacBook Air and Intel's Ultrabook initiative pushed PC makers to build ever thinner and lighter laptops with sturdier, premium materials like metal instead of plastic. It's been a great half decade of innovation.

But if you've been paying attention to the slew of new laptop announcements at CES 2017, you'll notice a new trend taking shape: Laptops are getting bigger and heavier again, to the point where they're anything but portable.

Why's this happening? Blame it on VR.

Up until now, laptops have prioritized portability and mobility over performance. And for good reason. For most people, a laptop that doesn't break your back and lasts all day is simply more important and useful than one that can play Overwatch at "ultimate" settings.

As machines meant to be carried around from one place to another, laptop makers have focused on shredding weight and increasing battery life.

Thin and light laptops aren't going away, though. They will still make up the majority of laptops shipped, but chunkier laptops will also become popular again as more people invest in PC-based VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

It's no secret that the Rift and Vive require a great deal of computing power. And though the minimum requirements needed to run these headsets have been reduced thanks to improved optimization techniques, if you want the best VR experience, you'll still want as much performance as possible.

Which means you'll want a PC that's got a super fast processor, a powerful graphics card and lots of RAM.

On a desktop tower, cramming all these parts and keeping them cool isn't nearly as much of a challenge as on a laptop. Just get a larger chassis, or add more fans or a liquid-cooling system.

Fitting these components into a laptop chassis while properly managing all the heat that's emitted, however, is way more difficult.

As such, it's not so much that PC makers necessarily want to sell bigger and heavier laptops, but that right now, because of the physical size of the graphics card and the cooling system, they have to go with larger designs, or risk their machines literally melting when running graphics-intensive applications like VR.

Sure, big, bulky gaming laptops with discrete graphics cards have been around for ages. The difference with these new clunkers is that PC makers are taking them to the extreme. They've already conceded that their laptops need to be huge and won't win any beauty contests, and so they might as well go crazy and add all kinds of over-the-top features that normally wouldn't make the cut in this form factor.

Take for example the Acer Predator 21 X laptop, which starts at $9,000. Acer could have simply built a VR-ready laptop at half the size and weight, but instead decided to go all out with a 21-inch curved display (the world's first), a friggin' full-sized mechanical keyboard and a trackpad that flips over to reveal a number pad.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Because why not, right? If you're going to go big, you might as well go really big and out-big every other machine.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Same goes for Razer's Project Valerie. The company already sells the Blade Pro, a 17-inch VR-ready gaming laptop. But in a sea of VR-ready laptops, the company's probably wondering how it can differentiate its VR-ready laptop from everyone else's. For the gaming company, that might mean adding two extra 4K screens to push the laptop's total resolution to 12K. Nuts!

Like all technology, the components will shrink over time. The chips and graphics cards will get smaller, and as a result the physical laptops will get thinner and lighter again. But until that happens, or self-contained VR headsets like Intel's Project Alloy become a thing, big and ugly (but powerful) gaming laptops will be the only way to experience high-end VR on the go.