COVID has limited us going out for a while and while some areas have opened up, some are still restricted. When coffee shops are readily frequentable again, I fully expect to see people there with their laptops. Some are students doing homework, others who work remotely and just want to get out of the house and myriad other reasons. What I have not seen, and don’t really expect to see a lot of are people doing serious photo or video editing.

Why not? It’s not like the tech cannot cope, our available laptops can bring incredible power but they also bring other issues, the most common of those being total storage.

Laptop makers still strive for the lowest cost of entry in their space, and small local storage and minimal memory is a way to keep the sticker price down. That brings buyers in the virtual door.. A lot of the time, particularly for visual creatives comes the requirement for external storage to supplement the storage built in. Not really a tech problem, there are plenty of fast small SSD type drives in the market. We can also get a Wacom tablet in a portable size if desired and on laptops we can get 16” and 17” diagonal screens.

If laptops are so powerful, do they not make the best system for editing photos and videos?

The true answer is likely no. I am asked by many laptop owners what external display they should buy.. The laptop display is great but fundamentally too small for editing effectively, unless one builds incredible dexterity zooming in and out. The problem with working zoomed in all the time is over editing because in general people zoom in too much, pixel peep too much and fail to see the forest while studying individual branches..

If you have use cases that require you to own a laptop, such as the REQUIREMENT to do what you do in multiple places, or in a role such as being an educator where you must go where the students are instead of zooming everyone into a coma, there may be good reasons for a laptop. However, if you do most all of your editing on your computer plugged into a big display at home, you may be better served by a desktop computer with a nice display that can take more storage, more memory and costs less.

I’m writing this today on a Windows laptop, a very nice Dell XPS17 that is a great computer except for its always running fan that you can hear across the room. I don’t recall the last time that I used its excellent 17” display. I bought a docking station to give me more ports and to support two external displays.. Did I buy right? Probably not. I could likely have saved $1500 or more with a compact desktop with the same power, more storage and at least the same amount of memory. I just replaced a 2013 MacBook Pro that has served me well with a new 16” MacBook Pro. The new machine was time because the old one could not run current operating systems and that meant that it was having issues with current software versions. The machine still works great for my 2019 workloads but not my current ones and with opening up happening after two years of lockdown, I have use cases that support the need for a laptop.

In the studio I have other computers, one set up just to record video and stream it. Another is in the music area for quick demos and ad hoc recording. Both machines are getting long in the tooth and showing that they are working very hard. They are laptops. but when the time comes they will be replaced by small desktops that will cost me less and perform as well or better than a similar laptop. I do my recording and production work in the studio. I can take a camera into the field and do stills or video, but I don’t even try to do serious editing in coffee shops or hotel rooms. The display is just too small and if I run a connection to the hotel room TV to give me more screen real estate, I don’t want to get into the colour issues.

My use cases are not likely to be identical to yours but we are likely closer than you might think. I prefer the user experience of macOS, so whatever I buy will be Macs, but the applications are the same if running on Windows, so choose whichever platform suits you best based on your application requirements. An M1 Mac Mini will run rings around my 6 year old Lenovo and when the time comes, I believe that the recently announced MacStudio will readily replace my 2014 Mac Pro. I don’t need monster boxes taking up space and I don’t need to buy a laptop and then spend all that extra money trying to turn it into a desktop. You may not either. A thought for your consideration.

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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.