Time for a new laptop, looking for suggestions

[Jim Lapenta]

Being a PC user I wanted something to use with Photoshop and Lightroom. My old laptops didn't have enough oomph. I looked at Apple but in all honesty, they weren't in my budget. I picked up a Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop on sale and it will only be used for content creation with Adobe CC and Libre Office. It's more than fast enough, the display is very close to the desktop monitor I use for processing photos (so no color correction differences that I can see), and the majority of the ports are in the back for clean routing of those peripherals I use with it.

 

[tep]

Re: Windows on Mac - as pointed out above you can dual-boot Windows with BootCamp - OR

You can just run Windows in a "window" - use VMware Fusion, which is free for non-commercial use. I use it for "odd" things:

Thoughts on how many years we should expect our dive computers to function properly.

 

[Chris Ross]

If you are only doing stills and using Lightroom there's probably not a lot to be gained by adding more cores as they still are not threaded that well - a good mid range processor with plenty of RAM will help. Depending on what software you use, the video processor does a lot of the hard work in image processing - PS does and I'm guessing lightroom as well. So does Capture One and for video Da Vinci resolve. For these programs having an option with a separate (not on chip) video processor with a decent amount of RAM will help a lot.

 

[stuartv]

My wife is still using her MBP-15 mid-2012, the last one with antireflective screen and user-upgradeable disk and memory (and Nvidia card). She has now a nice 4-TB SSD (Samsung) and 16 GB RAM, and after 8 years that machine is still working very well. No Windows laptop of the same age is still fully operational...

My Dell Precision Mobile Workstation is from 2009. Quad core CPU, 16GB of RAM, and I put a 2TB SSD in it. It still works fine. I actually have an even older Dell that still works fine, too. It just has too many obsolete components and is too slow to use anymore.

My Macbook Pro Retina 15 from 2013 has not fared quite as well, as the battery swelled up and made a bulge in the case about 2 years ago. That was a $250 repair at the Apple store. It does still work fine, though.

But, I replaced it as my daily driver last summer with a Dell XPS 15. 10th Gen Intel i7 CPU (8 cores), 64 GB RAM, and 2TB SSD.

The XPS 15 works pretty darn well for editing the 61MP photos from my a7rIV. I would take it again over a Macbook any day.

 

[rolanddiver]

It all depends on what you want to use it for. If you need something super fast/powerful for video/photo editing, I would go for a MacBook Pro. If you need something that never breaks and super reliable than go for a Panasonic Toughbook CF 33.

 

[Rickk]

I use an older ( 6 years now) MS Surface Pro, they make updated models with the same form factor. It is a great travel computer, You can get a wide range of options for processor, RAM and SSD size. When it die, I will replace with another.

A little limited in what you can connect to it but with one of the two different docking stations available you can attach a wide range of peripherals to it. I have used it as a desktop replacement with the dock, monitor and wireless keyboard and could take it to a meeting and use it as a tablet.

 

[KenGordon]

I would not be buying an Intel Mac at the moment. If you really want a Mac then try to wait for the next round of processor releases.

All modern processors are very fast, avoid the extremely crippled ones that entry level machines have and you will be ok. Memory is the thing. The physically nicer laptops generally have directly soldered memory which cannot be upgraded. Today 16GB is a minimum for serious work but really you cannot have too much so either buy a machine with 32 or more or get one that still takes DIMMs.

I do sw dev and I have been using a 16GB Surface Book 2 with a four core (8 HT) for almost everything since March. I have done a couple of things on my 128GB ten core desktop (via Remote Desktop) either because the instructions start with having a TB of free disk or because I need a bunch of VMs each using a good lump of RAM. These days browsers and Teams seem to eat RAM so even a local laptop needs plenty or you have to be thinking about it.