47greyfox Loc: on the edge of the Colorado front range

Pay attention to the “recommendations” and, if you can afford it, buy to meet or exceed them more than the minimum requirements. You’ll thank me in the morning.

petercbrandt Loc: New York City, Manhattan

I have been using my old MacBookPro from 2008. Its off line, no internet, no corruption, and a second one from 2015 for the internet. On the '08 model I use Photoshop CS4. I changed the hard drive to SSD, its much faster. That works really well for me.

ELNikkor

Getting disillusioned with Windows. Up 'til now, no problem using all my old flash drives with Windows, as they were all holding info from Windows computers. Now, it doesn't recognize any of the files and tells me to buy Windows 365, which I already have and have been using for 3 years!

APSHEPPARD

I use windows and am satisfied. You do need adequate RAM and storage, but I enjoy having a BenQ Monitor which is photo quality.

photoman43

I have always used windows laptops and desktops as I found Apple products not worth the extra cost, but that is me.

My current laptop is a Lenovo 15inch ThinkPad X1 with a 1 TB SSD and a video card with dedicated RAM with windows 10 Pro. I would select a laptop with as much RAM as you can afford, but at least 16GB. The video card and its RAM is tied to the screen and its resolution and other features that comes with the laptop. Make sure any laptop has the output ports you need to support your devices like a mouse, external hard drive and similar things. Many laptops designed for travel lack needed ports IMO.

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

I have 2. A MacBook Pro with 32GB is my main. A Microsoft Surface Book 2 with 32GB is my backup.

dandev Loc: Enumclaw, WA

I bought a Dell XPS15 at Costco. Very happy with the purchase.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Now that Adobe has fully optimized its photography software for the new Apple M1 architecture, the MacBook Air is the best value in the category. I bought one for my son back in the Winter. He loves it... for everything except gaming. For gaming, and ONLY gaming, he built a custom PC. But for school and work, the MBA is his daily driver.

It's not perfect, but the thing is wicked fast for the money. MacOS 11.4 is quite stable. The M1 uses tiny amounts of electricity for the same or much better performance than Intel Macs in the same price range. People are getting 5 to 8 hours of battery life under HEAVY workloads, and 15 to 18 hours just watching movies or web surfing. It is dead quiet, too... THERE IS NO FAN. It will throttle back slightly under extended heavy loads, but the slowdown is not significant for most people. Those who notice it are probably benchmarking nerds.

Most people find 8 GB Unified Memory (shared RAM) to be enough, unless they want to run multiple applications or process EXTREMELY large files. Still, I'd get the 16GB model. But I like to push my gear — hard.

https://youtu.be/ma8KjSH7Hok — (Rene Ritchie talks 8 GB vs 16 GB)
https://youtu.be/k-PVx_lLRL8 — (Mark Ellis talks 8 GB vs 16 GB)

Storage is expensive on these models, but it is WICKED fast. By the time you find an external M.2 NVMe drive with roughly the same speed, Apple's storage prices look affordable. Still, to save money, many folks get the 256 GB or 512 GB model and plug in more drives running at various slower speeds.

The MacBook Air's two 40 Gbps ThunderBolt 3/USB4 ports can connect to ANYTHING via adapters, dongles, hubs, and docks. You can connect anything *directly,* if it has a USB-C connector. This means you may want a hub or dock for your desk (to connect an external monitor, charger, wired keyboard, wired mouse, audio interface, Wacom tablet, various storage drives... You may want a portable hub for the road. Here are the two I like:

https://www.charjenpro.com/products/ultimatedock (portable)
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/docks/owc-thunderbolt-3-dock

If you want to see some real world performance tests against the best Windows laptops in the same price range, as well as Macs costing several times as much, watch the videos on these YouTube Channels:

https://www.youtube.com/c/MaxTechOfficial/search?query=MacBook%20Air — (MaxTech)
https://youtu.be/a1uLMiUmseQ — (iJustine)
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=everyday+dad+macbook+air — (Everyday Dad)
https://youtu.be/7xy0itqV780 — (Terran Rule's six month review)

Many of us Mac heads were disappointed that Apple released NO hardware at WWDC last week. Well, they will eventually. But the next wave will be higher-end models, and the third wave will be top-end models, all of which will be more to much more expensive.

For those of us who DON'T do massive amounts of image rendering in Lightroom Classic, or 8K video editing, or even 4K video editing with lots of LUTS, audio tracks, titles, and effects, The M1 Macs are likely enough. I will probably be getting an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB/1TB, plus a hub or dock and an external monitor, later this summer. My aging iMac (Late 2013 21.5") is getting old. It has 16GB RAM and a 2TB SSD in it, so it's reasonably fast for its age, but by Fall, it will be two operating systems behind the times, and that's getting into the security danger zone.

Ed D Loc: Virginia

This is extremely helpful. Thanks so much!

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

Oh, but the machine does matter. It has to meet the specs at bare minimum. What ever you get, make sure it is more than minimum.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

What is your desktop? I always recommend to stay with what you know to my friends. If you're into Windows stay with windows, if your desktop is a Mac then hold off a bit and wait for the new silicon to make it to the Mac Book Pro 16". Right now the amount of memory required/available is an unknown.

ecurb Loc: Metro Chicago Area

Look at the Dell Alienware gaming laptops and a couple good external drives. I would not consider anything Apple.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

There are two solutions for running Windows on Intel Macs:

Intel Macs are basically PCs. Apple supplies BootCamp, which partitions hard drives and installs drivers for Windows to make use of the Intel Mac hardware. You can boot the Mac into MacOS OR Windows.

Another option on Intel Macs is to run Parallels Desktop, an emulation package that lets you run Windows or Linux or even DOS on your Mac, AS AN APPLICATION on top of MacOS. You can hot-switch back and forth between two operating systems, copy and paste between them, share the same network and peripherals, etc. I've used this solution for years, and it's worked flawlessly for me.

The new M1 Macs are ARM-architecture machines. They are totally different from Intel machines. They do not run Bootcamp. But they WILL run Parallels Desktop 16.5, and Windows 10 for ARM, which is still a Developer Preview. For most tasks, this works well, and it will only get better as Microsoft updates Windows for ARM. M1 with Parallels Desktop actually runs Windows for ARM FASTER than Microsoft ARM computers!

The old, "eliminate the Mac if you need any single piece of Windows software" has been specious BS since 2000. I was running Windows 2000 on Connectix VirtualPC on a PowerBook G3 back then, with a handful of Windows apps. Some heavy duty apps ran slowly then, but they worked.

In 2008, I bought a MacBook Pro and Parallels Desktop. I cloned my Dell Latitude 610 laptop drive (Win XP) to the Parallels Desktop partition, and it ran three times faster than the older Dell! So I traveled for work with one laptop and used all my proprietary corporate apps and my creative apps on that one machine.

No more than I need Win 10 now, I run it on my Mac using Parallels.

tcthome Loc: NJ

Get one of the M1 labtops. Mac Air or the Macbook Pro with the 8 core processor & 16 of ram. The pro has better speakers & screen. if you decide to go windows, MSI, Dell, Razor & Lenevo all make good labtops with varying prices.
If you go windows , get the most processor, you can afford & a dedicated graphics card. For home you might want to add an external monitor.

Abo

Imho the hardware does matter when you process photos... Particularly large raw files.

Lots of display resolution gives finer image detail, which is useful when post processing.

Plenty of RAM speeds up the work.