@lain's comment on 'Talk me out of this, into this, or offer an alternative. No I won’t switch to Windows or Linux.'

I have $11k to play with - most of which will end up going towards car expenses. I have to spend like $3000 of it before the end of the year for reasons I won't elaborate on. So it's this, or putting money into the Porsche, and I can't use the Porsche during the winter so it would lack the gratification I'm seeking to do so.

I used to be a professional photographer (www.bradgillette.net) and during the process became really good at Photoshop.

Then I stopped working, my computer got old (2013 i7 iMac), and I couldn't edit in Photoshop anymore because my computer was too slow. I don't know if I'm going to be able to become a professional photographer again, or if it's just going to be a hobby, but I'm worried I've lost a lot of my skills from lack of use. I feel like having a new, more powerful computer will inspire me to get back into it. In the meantime I've gotten really good at nailing shots in-camera and doing very minor editing, basically limited to what I could do in a physical color darkroom. That said, my images could always be improved with Photoshop.

I bought my current computer, a 2020 M1 MacBook Air, a couple years ago to do normal computer things and minor editing with my old camera (Canon 5D mkII) but now I have a new camera (Canon 5R) that produces much larger file sizes and it's too slow to run Photoshop to any useful extent and using Lightroom is painful.

I also want to get back into video production.

Should I dump $3500 into a laptop that could do everything I could ask of it, even though I don't have the income stream to support it at the time, and use it for practice? Or should I look at cheaper options like around $2500. I feel like if I don't spend the extra $1000 it'll come to bite me in the butt in the future.

This post is brought to you by weed, adderall, and lack of sleep thinking about this darn computer.