OT: Need Assistance with Specs For Laptop For Photo Editing

[.RJ]

Originally Posted by MikeD

That's the big reason I won't buy a Mac laptop. Everything is hard soldered, including the hard drive. Basically, you can't upgrade or easily make repairs to the machine, except by plugging something into a port. Also, no touch screen.

If nothing breaks, you dont need a repair

To each their own though. Over time I've switched everything in the house over to apple products - laptops, phones, tables, router, apple tv. It all just works, seamlessly, together (airdrop, airplay, photo sharing, etc, etc) with no effort and causes zero headache in my life and their support is the best I've used. Buy once, cry once.

[benb]

I have Macs & PCs. It's better to have both and be able to use the right tool for the job.

For both photo and video editing it's way more important to think about what your requirements are for software. The software differences can make it worthwhile to go one way or the other.

I have an absolutely massive digital photo archive. There's no way in hell it's fitting on any laptop with an SSD or even some giant fugly PC laptop with an SSD + big spinning disk. My photos sit on a 16TB NAS I bought.

So if you have real requirements for storing photos (and videos get there a lot faster) Mac vs PC is irrelevant, and upgrading the HDD/SSD storage in the laptop is irrelevant. It's all just scratch space.

Adobe's software has become horrific in terms of poor performance. They are basically expecting you to buy a new $5000 machine every year or it's your fault when the software is slow. I used Lightroom for close to a decade but stopped paying for it a year or so ago. Right now I have a Capture One 12 license that I don't have to pay a monthly fee for, and it has much better performance and ways to deal with large #s of photos. I think at this point it is highly worth trying to avoid Adobe.. you can save yourself hundreds or thousands of dollars over the years, other software has largely caught up and performs better unless you have very specific needs.

Now for video, how important is video and what is your target for quality? If you can get by with iMovie on a Mac you instantly saved enough money that the Mac vs PC cost difference vanishes.

I just bought one of the new Macbook Pros basically just to have a stupid fast laptop to run iMovie and similar stuff on. iMovie works fine for what I need and it basically pays for itself vs ending up paying lots of money for windows software to do the same thing. That's just me though, I can't be bothered to edit video unless it's quick and easy.

A lot of the windows video editing software IMO is so bad I'd rather edit the footage on my iPhone than deal with the windows software, especially since it saves me lots of money.

[.RJ]

Originally Posted by benb

Adobe's software has become horrific in terms of poor performance. They are basically expecting you to buy a new $5000 machine every year or it's your fault when the software is slow. I used Lightroom for close to a decade but stopped paying for it a year or so ago. Right now I have a Capture One 12 license that I don't have to pay a monthly fee for, and it has much better performance and ways to deal with large #s of photos.

Lightroom works just fine on my 5+ year old Mac with 50MB fuji raw files, and I switched from the desktop version to CC this year. I tried Capture One and the interface was atrocious, I couldnt get on with it.

Shrug.