burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The Panasonic Toughbooks are particularly resilient. Lifetouch uses them in most of their portrait rigs. If a school photographer can't beat them up, nobody can!

pendennis

Toshiba's were what our company ended up buying. They looked at a number, Dell, Toshiba, IBM, Panasonic.

planepics Loc: St. Louis burbs, but originally Chicago burbs

My sister just came back from NC where she taught a geocaching seminar for different park rangers around the country. She's a ranger for the St. Louis County parks and had geocached for years. She tried to get me into it and I have the app on my phone, but I've never used it...hardly have any data on phone plan...she has unlimited. She keeps track of one traveling cache in particular, trying to get it to a particular place in Scotland where her late husband's family roots are from. He was only 37 when he died. PS I'd have a desktop if I had enough room for one. Used to have one.

hassighedgehog Loc: Corona, CA

I use my 17" monitor at Starbucks. No good internet at home.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Things are looking up for laptops especially macbooks the new usb c thunderbolt connections are very fast, there are now external boxes which have pci graphics cards inside and additional ports which hook up with 1 cable which does data and power.

Granted a mobile cpu is not going to run as fast as a desktop system but you can't have failed to notice a lot of adobes programs run code on the gpu rather than the cpu now. Graphics performance with these egpu's is very good, If i remember the review i read correctly the graphics performance was better than an iMac pro.

So docked you have a powerhouse and undocked you also have the portability and battery life. If you require both a laptop and a desktop system its worth considering. This is still pretty new of course but its likely to become more mainstream over the next year or two.

One thing that may have changed the playing field is meltdown and spectre. With mitigations slowing down cpu performance and cpu designers now having to look at designing new processors the use of gpu's may become more important for processing than ever before.

Interesting times, there may be some interesting options coming up. When you see how thin the ipads are now perhaps we may see a detachable screen on a macbook pro which is also an ipad wouldn't that be fun. then you could put that screen anywhere (not in front of the large external monitor which you are trying to use).

Allen1218

Laptops usually have a much shorter life span than desktop computers.

therwol Loc: USA

I'm typing this on a 10 year old Dell D530 laptop. I put an SSD in it and maxed out the RAM. It's running Windows 10 Pro. Okay, I wouldn't do video editing with only 4 gigs of RAM, and I do have better computers available, but it still works for most things. Besides, I like tinkering with things.

therwol Loc: USA

My wife and I visit the UK once a year for several weeks. We do geocaching in and around the Lake District and in Southern Scotland every time we go. There are two advantages over doing it in the US. One is that you're not going to be bitten by a poisonous snake when reaching under things, and two, you're probably not going to be shot or arrested for snooping around suspiciously. We take a laptop with us and map out the caches, writing down the coordinates etc to put in the GPS device we carry. Some people do it just with a phone. We definitely don't have unlimited data out of the country, but we do have internet access.

Allen1218

I'm just going by the advice that my former IT manager gave me. I do have a 11 year old Toshiba laptop (I keep it for the XP programs i can't run on 10) that I had to replace the hard drive in at 3 years but on his advice put it and my newer laptops on cooling pads than run when the laptop is on.

therwol Loc: USA

As I mentioned earlier, I can do video capture on my old laptop from digital tape because it has a firewire port. There is no other way to do it from tape. USB doesn't work. Another thing is that I have the 32 bit version of Windows 10 on it. The 32 bit version will run 16 bit software, like a few very old games my wife likes to play. I used to use cooling pads with the noisy fans, and those things always broke or got so loud I couldn't stand them. Maybe I didn't spend enough money for good ones.

kcooke Loc: Alabama

I have Both windows and Mac computers at my home. All are laptops except for my mid 2010 Mac Pro Tower 5.1. I find it very upgradeable. I have 6 available internal drive bays that will easily hold 2 TB each for a total of 12 TB. Maximum memory is 48 GB. Mine has an Intel Zeon 3.2 GHz quad core processor that is hyper threaded to 8 core. It is upgradeable to a dual processor 12 core. I don’t have any processing speed issues or upgrade issues whatsoever with mine.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Agree completely, but the Pro tower is a very different beast than the IMacs which are mostly used and discussed here, and as I’m sure you know, the upgrades for those machines are few, and other than memory are difficult or impossible. My comment was not intended as anti-Mac, just a general statement of fact (with some exceptions, such as yours)

Cheers,
Chris

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Before buying any Mac, it’s a good idea to read/watch the iFixIt tear down of it, and to check Macsales.com for upgrade options.

Apple often sings a more restrictive tune than reality, for those with nimble fingers who can follow explicit instructions.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Agreed. Removing a screen from an IMac to get to the internals isn’t fun, but can be done (i’ve done it, but didn’t enjoy the process). Some will allow a CPU change (if it was an option) and RAM can be changed, either easily or requiring some effort, depending on the model, but no question that your upgrade path is limited, so choose wisely upfront (and consider after-market RAM to save $).

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The only caveat with third party RAM is to be sure you replace all OEM RAM with a set of larger capacity sticks that are exactly the same. Most of the RAM issues I've seen over the years happened due to mis-matches of modules. Some companies will take your old RAM modules in trade. OWC and Crucial and Kingston are good sources.

The key to getting into an iMac is patience, and the right tools. There are great videos and manuals on several sites that explain and illustrate the process in detail. OWC (macsales.com) is particularly helpful.