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.
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Macf@g
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Imagine letting tribalism stop you from buying literally the best laptops on the whole market. Nothing else even comes close to the power efficiency/performance of Apple silicon.
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I just don't need a Mac to prove my cute twinkry. I'm secure in who I am. !gay
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Linux twinks
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I would say I'm a Linux bear, but the bears all consider me slim.
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Linux otter?
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Neighbor spending upwards of 2k on a laptop that doesn't even have a top of the line GPU is absurd. I was looking at Macbooks for a replacement laptop but was put off by the prices. Apple's premium is offensive to good sense.
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The unified stands for "slow"
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Why even bother getting a laptop with a top of the line GPU? You pay a premium compared to the equivalent desktop parts, you get no battery life because dedicated laptop GPUs drain energy, and it's a heavy brick that removes the portability advantage that laptops are supposed to have. Not to mention laptops degrade much more quickly than desktops.
The only "gaming" laptops worth getting are those with the souped up iGPUs which can play most games on the market at low/med settings.
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Gaming laptops are for people with more money than sense. They look gaudy as all heck and I can't imagine anyone post-adolescence being into them.
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If you put those high powered Nvidia chips into a laptop you will end up with a desktop replacement with loud butt fans that lasts like an hour max on battery. Macbooks are actual laptops.
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I understand that. My point is that at that price if you aren't paying for something like high end GPUs there's no way the dollar/performance ratio is going to be worth it no matter how well made the hardware could be.
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I don't know; My M1 Pro MacBook performs on par with or even better than my Intel desktop PC with an i5 12th gen for everything that I do.
There's not many tasks that you do on a computer that involves the GPU.
The only time the GPU matters is if you're playing video games, but these laptops are for doing work on not playing games.
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And I'm saying you don't need a whole lot for a work computer which is why the $2k laptop is absurd. You can get something that's only a little bit worse for significantly less money.
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