Can a laptop fill my Adobe photoshop/lightroom needs?

itguy08 said:

Austinian said:

I must admit, it's a refreshing change to see an honest admission of bias on DPR instead of deeply hidden agendas. Good for you!

Actual data; the link may be behind the CR paywall (I subscribe). If so, here's a brief summary:

"These conclusions are based on our breakage rate estimates for laptops by the end of the 2nd year of ownership, gathered from subscribers' experiences with 41,304 laptops purchased new between 2014 and the first quarter of 2017. Our statistical model estimates breakage rates for laptops not covered by a service contract and accounts for the number of hours of use per week. Differences of less than 5 points aren't meaningful." (my bolding)

Apple 10% (I give them credit for reliability at least.)

Samsung 16%

Acer 18%

HP 20%

Asus 20%

Lenovo 21%

Dell 22%

Toshiba 24%

Microsoft 25%

So, denounce Dell all you like. It won't affect the facts. Extremes aside, the brand differences are minor. I think choosing a correctly featured model is far more important than the choice of brand.

https://www.consumerreports.org/products/laptop/brand-reliability/

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So I said Dell is bottom of the barrel and by your own data, they are the 3rd worst vendor for reliability. No matter what the widget I'd not want to buy something from the bottom brands regardless of how the testing place justifies it.

Here's another from someone who actually repairs these things:

https://www.rescuecom.com/news-press-releases/rescuecom-2018-computer-reliability-report.aspx

It's interesting how the data falls in their study but this text is telling:

itguy08 said:

Since Michael Dell took Dell private, it appears his focus is on maximizing profits supersedes improving designs translating into cheaply made computers. DELL has a service tag system which allows its technicians to see the components put into each computer, in layman’s terms, even identical model computers may not contain the same components, causing constancy problems which adversely affects reliability.

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I realize you may be from Austin, TX so have some bias towards Dell but they are not a good computer vendor and I stand by my statement that you should avoid them if you want a good computer.

For the record, I've owned a slew of Macs, have a homebuilt Desktop, a Surface Pro, and an HP Spectre. All have given me excellent service. My work PC's have included IBM, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. All but the Dells and some of the early Thinkpads have been excellent. The Dells have been junk. I've only had the Surface a few months so the jury's out and luckilly it's a 3rd compuer AND has an extended warranty.

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Like others have mentioned it's a small difference so the bigger concern in my book is the service.

If a computer has a slightly lower rate of failure yet you have to send it in to be fixed then it's more likely to be a headache for the end user. So I'd go for any of those brands who have on site service and I would pay for it at least for a year or 2 with the failure rate being high enough across the board to put all systems at risk.

Austinian said:

sygnus21 said:

Anyway, In keeping things short, I might have given Asus a hard look but for two things - bad customer service experience, and they didn't offer the features I got in my Lenovo.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

This was our experience with Asus support:

http://dilbert.com/strip/1999-02-11

Austinian said:

CR's tech support data says that except for Apple and to a lesser extent Microsoft, they're all about equally dismal. :-(

READER SCORE

• 82 Apple
• 68 Microsoft
• 56 Dell
• 54 Lenovo
• 53 HP
• 52 Asus
• 51 Samsung
• 50 Acer/Gateway
• 50 Toshiba

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I thought Toshiba had abandoned the PC industry?

Yikes, we own several Samsung tablets but fortunately they have no moving parts.

P.S. Consumer Reports has gone way downhill, so far that it now seems useless to subscribe. For instance, try to find a list of plug-in hybrid vehicles in the 2018 model year.

itguy08 said:

itguy08 said:

So having the catalogue on the external hard drive is not a solution in your opinion, even if that would avoid the issue of exporting and importing catalogues?

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For me it's not an option as I'd not want to carry a copy of my entire library on an external hard drive. The drive can get lost, damaged, etc quite easily on the go. I also like to edit on both the desktop and laptop so keeping changes in sync or remembering to move the drive would be problematic.

What I do is have my main catalogues on the desktop which is the master copy. That is all backed up to another drive and the cloud. If I want to edit something I do the export to a catalog on an external drive and edit that on the road and reimport when I get home.

For photos on the go I import directly to a catalog on the laptop's hard drive or an external. I cull, edit, etc and when I get home export to an external catalog and import into the desktop. It's a pain but does seem to work and keep the main catalog safe.

Click to expand...

Thanks again. I might very well misunderstand this, but I have seen it recommended to keep the library (the actual photo files?) on an external drive (with one cloud backup, and one secondary external hard drive backup).

Wouldn't that also work for the catalogue? You can even have a backup on the interndal ssd?

But, anyway - your recommendation for working with two computers is firmly to have the catalogue stored on the dekstop and use import/export to work on the go from the laptop?

But if I go for just the laptop (which does not seem impossible from what I read here) then I assume it is reasonable to keep the catalogue on the laptop, even if the library is stored externally?

And if so - I've read somewhere that you can still do much work on your photos when the external drive is disconnected, as long as the preview files are stored locally? How much storage would I need on the laptop to do that?

silentstorm said:

EdvardDa said:

silentstorm said:

Sure.

Also if you start to do heavy duty stuffs, it's only a matter waiting time, how much are you willing to wait? I remember my friend told me many years ago how their G4 Ti book can run FCP3 very well, they just leave it to render for the next 30hrs for a few layers of effects.

Ultimately boils down to your patience. There's also an option to buy a workstation laptop that runs on i9 cpu and Quadro cards with 100% aRGB 17" screen, if you choose to up the ante.

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Thanks for your reply!

The question about portability vs performance is the nut I'm still trying to crack. I don't really have a sense of how much patience I would have to mount if I'll go with a lightweight laptop!

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In that case I think any i7 laptop with integrated graphics will do. Recommended to have 16GB ram.

And if 15" is preferable, you can check out LG Gram series of laptop, insanely very light. The 13" and 14" are below 1kg, the 15" just touched 1kg.

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The more I read, the more it seems to be a fully workable to go "laptop only", really. Even a fairly lightweight one that might cost more, but is available with both i7, 16gb ram and a separate graphic card.

Some remaining questions

- Does lightweigt have other disadvantages than cost (assuming the parts are all the same?). Heating issues might be more of an issue, but less so as long as most of the work is Lightroom/Photoshop that use the gpu sparingly?

- The Dell XPS 15 (for example) comes with a 4K-screen option (with better adobeRGB stats) - but will that slow down things (or cause more gpu heating issues) more than it is helpful?

- How much internal storage should be mimimum ? Many laptops seems to go with 256-512 GB SDD?

yanisha said:

Are you working on 16mp files? 50mp files? What?

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Assuming you ask me, my main camera body is 24 megapixels, but I frequently works with panorama and hdr shooting.

Normal raw files is 20-25 MB each I believe.

DavidC said:

I like my XPS 15 9550 and have found it reliable, fast and powerful once set up. The only issues I had were (a) it came with a touch screen (which I disabled ok), (b) the battery needed to be replaced after a few months because the batch of batteries it came from swelled after a while (replaced without problem by a home visit Dell engineer for free); (c) I needed to tame the wide colour gamut display (beautiful though it is) with a calibration using an X-Rite i1 Display Pro 2 (having removed Dell's Premier Colour software); and (d) because it comes with an Intel 530 graphics solution which the laptop always want to use, I needed to set the laptop to use the Nvidia graphics card with Photoshop (in the Nvidia Control Panel) in order to get the PS Open GL etc to work..

I have not been put off by these teething issues. It works well day in day out with no problems now. Incidentally, I have 32Gb memory and use an additional external ssd hard drive (2Tb T3 Samsung) for data files.

David

www.davidcolepictures.co.uk

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Thanks!

Would you recommend to keep away from the 4K touch screen option, in such cases?

And how much of a difference will 32gb ram make, as not all laptops seems to be available with that amound (and if they do - that is often a pricey option)?

EdvardDa said:

The more I read, the more it seems to be a fully workable to go "laptop only", really. Even a fairly lightweight one that might cost more, but is available with both i7, 16gb ram and a separate graphic card.

Some remaining questions

- Does lightweigt have other disadvantages than cost (assuming the parts are all the same?). Heating issues might be more of an issue, but less so as long as most of the work is Lightroom/Photoshop that use the gpu sparingly?

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I don't see any beside cost. Normal usage with LR/PS shouldn't even kick the fan into high mode. Only the final export from RAW (usually it's the denoising) that actually maxing the GPU.

EdvardDa said:

- The Dell XPS 15 (for example) comes with a 4K-screen option (with better adobeRGB stats) - but will that slow down things (or cause more gpu heating issues) more than it is helpful?

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4K will tax the GPU slightly more than 1080, but not much. Very unlikely to kick your GPU into higher than its base clock speed.

EdvardDa said:

- How much internal storage should be mimimum ? Many laptops seems to go with 256-512 GB SDD?

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I have two 256GB (M2 + 2.5"), but as mentioned, my whole 2TB collection is on external drive that I carry with me. I only copy a small subset that I'm working on into my internal SSD (usually about 30GB-100GB max). But I also dual-boot (Windows for gaming, Ubuntu for everything else). I think you should go with 512GB, but it'd be best if the laptop comes with a spare slot (M2 or 2.5") as SSD price has been dropping steadily the last few weeks.

EdvardDa said:

Thanks again. I might very well misunderstand this, but I have seen it recommended to keep the library (the actual photo files?) on an external drive (with one cloud backup, and one secondary external hard drive backup).

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I think it's personal preference. I like to have my photos on an internal drive that is backed up to an external and then to a cloud service. The catalog is also stored on these same drives. The backups of the Lightroom Catalog go to the internal drive and are backed up to the cloud too. The desktop is on and connected 24/7 so backups happen 3x a week locally (Mon/Wed/Fri) and as needed to the cloud (I use Crashplan but most likely will switch to Arq/Wasabi).

EdvardDa said:

Wouldn't that also work for the catalogue? You can even have a backup on the interndal ssd?

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Yeah although I have the catalog on the internal SSD and the backups on the spinning disks.

EdvardDa said:

But, anyway - your recommendation for working with two computers is firmly to have the catalogue stored on the dekstop and use import/export to work on the go from the laptop?

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I think it's personal preference but that's the workflow I'm using. It seems to work reasonably well. The desktop is where I do my critical editing and it has the most horsepower, bigger monitors, and constant connection.

EdvardDa said:

But if I go for just the laptop (which does not seem impossible from what I read here) then I assume it is reasonable to keep the catalogue on the laptop, even if the library is stored externally?

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You could but if you use and edit on a desktop too you'd need to keep both in sync somehow. AFAIK Adobe doesn't support any way to do that as the catalog is a SQL database.

EdvardDa said:

And if so - I've read somewhere that you can still do much work on your photos when the external drive is disconnected, as long as the preview files are stored locally? How much storage would I need on the laptop to do that?

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You can but it still needs a bit of space to do that.

From my catalog:

• 27,565 pictures (from 1MP Olympus in 2001 to today's cameras) in 377GB
• My catalog folder is 158GB, of that 26GB is Smart Previews and 131GB is regular previews.

I believe you only need the Smart Previews for editing on the go so you don't need a huge amount of space if you stay on top of the previews.

That's the other consideration in why my workflow is the desktop first and the laptop as an on the go or secondary editing platform.

There is some flexibility in how you do it so you may want to experiment to see what works for you.

Austinian said:

Ah yes, the repair site you trusted enough to quote from but apparently didn't read (or didn't believe) their "interesting" data and conclusions.

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Why I said the data was interesting. It put Dell up, HP down, and Microsoft up quite a bit. It's interesting data. It was also interesting they felt the need to call out Dell specifically in their cheapening of newer models. That right there would be cause for concern.

But then again I have no financial ties to any of these manufacturers other than being an Apple shareholder....

CAcreeks said:

Austinian said:

sygnus21 said:

Anyway, In keeping things short, I might have given Asus a hard look but for two things - bad customer service experience, and they didn't offer the features I got in my Lenovo.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

This was our experience with Asus support:

http://dilbert.com/strip/1999-02-11

CAcreeks said:

CR's tech support data says that except for Apple and to a lesser extent Microsoft, they're all about equally dismal. :-(

READER SCORE

• 82 Apple
• 68 Microsoft
• 56 Dell
• 54 Lenovo
• 53 HP
• 52 Asus
• 51 Samsung
• 50 Acer/Gateway
• 50 Toshiba

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I thought Toshiba had abandoned the PC industry?

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IDK, but Amazon still shows 2018 models:

https://www.amazon.com/Tecra-Busine...pID=41YcJ5PPhIL&preST=_SX300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

CAcreeks said:

Yikes, we own several Samsung tablets but fortunately they have no moving parts.

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Edit: Ah, you're talking about the exploding washers! Very strange.

CAcreeks said:

P.S. Consumer Reports has gone way downhill, so far that it now seems useless to subscribe.

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I still find CR useful, but I have my own criticisms of them. Too far OT, though.

CAcreeks said:

For instance, try to find a list of plug-in hybrid vehicles in the 2018 model year.

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No thanks.

I would probably buy a UHD screen again. Now it is properly calibrated it behaves well. The touch element is not for me. Fortunately you can remove it.

I fitted the extra ram myself and it benefits the operation of the whole system (starts quicker) and Photoshop eats ram. I would not now run a Photoshop system with less than 32Gb ram. I don't know about Lightroom.

I do find the screen size limiting but 17" laptops are monsters.

DavidC said:

I fitted the extra ram myself and it benefits the operation of the whole system (starts quicker) and Photoshop eats ram. I would not now run a Photoshop system with less than 32Gb ram. I don't know about Lightroom.

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darktable takes about 350MB of RAM during normal usage, and cranks up to 600MB when exporting RAW. GIMP starts up at 300MB, opening a 24MP JPG will kick it up to 600MB, copying/pasting into 5 layers ended up at 1.1GB.

I assume LR and PS would behave similarly. Can you run PS editing a 24MP file with some layers and editing, and look at Task Manager to see how much it uses? I don't expect it to use more than 4GB unless you have complex editing on large files.

I think 16GB is safe. I use my laptop for web development so Nginx, MySQL, Apache Solr, memcached, Eclipse, four separate instances of Firefox (about 15 tabs in total), Google Chrome, Thunderbird, ... and can still use GIMP, darktable, and Hugin all at the same time without ever hitting swap.

Austinian said:

CR's tech support data says that except for Apple and to a lesser extent Microsoft, they're all about equally dismal. :-(

Click to expand...

Unfortunately "dismal" seems to be the standard for a lot of companies (not just PC makers) and outsourcing their customer service / tech support hasn't made things better. In addition to language barriers, you have the scripts service reps are required to adhere to. Scripts requires less training and less knowledge. It's those that can think outside the script that a calling customer hopes to get. Unfortunately this is not always the case, and thus a bad customer service experience.

I kid you not, but I once had a HP tech support person tell me their monitors didn't work with ATI (AMD) GPU's. No lie. As you can see, when you don't know about the product a customer is calling about you're prone to say things that make no sense. Now you have a frustrated customer bad mouthing your company and never returning again.

Austinian said:

Something else I should have added (but didn't for brevity) is that by "features" I don't only mean easily quantifiable performance aspects like CPU speed or number of USB ports, important as those are. IMO personal user-interface preferences can be even more important for long-term satisfaction. By that, I mean things like perceived display quality, keyboard, trackpad size, feel and response, noise levels, and so on.

Click to expand...

Features like those to me fall under a particular product line all vendors have. Dell with Inspiron, XPS, G-Series; Lenovo with ThinkPad, IdeaPad, Yoga, etc...

If you go with a low line product, you get low line features.

Austinian said:

Occasionally some of the better PC reviewers will discuss these aspects, but that is by necessity subjective opinion, and not all models even get extensive reviews.

Click to expand...

I personally use reviews, user inputs, and forums to get an idea about a product I'm interested in. But reviews are a big part of the equation as user input can get emotional at times. Example this site

Austinian said:

Most laptop models aren't available locally even in a fair-sized city.

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I looked locally but ordered direct from Lenovo with the specs I wanted. No one would have had that model, not even B&H who came close. If you're looking for a spec'd out machine, you'll probably have to go direct as I did.

EdvardDa said:

Thanks again. I might very well misunderstand this, but I have seen it recommended to keep the library (the actual photo files?) on an external drive (with one cloud backup, and one secondary external hard drive backup).

Click to expand...

This was the back in the day way of thinking when SSD storage space was small and prices high. Nowadays, with storage space increasing and prices dropping I see no reason to split the OS. Nowadays you can get a 256gg SSD drive for under a $100 bucks and have plenty of space for the OS and its native folders. Heck, even when got my first SSD drive, an OCZ 128 gig, I kept the OS and all it's folders on the drive and just moved as needed to my 2TB Western Digital hard drive.

I currently have a 512gig SSD for my OS drive with Windows 10 and all it's native folders (Photos, Documents, Music) installed there. My core programs like Photoshop, LR, and a myriad of other programs, also get installed there. Total space used.... 132gig thus far.

That said, I do have other drives in my system dedicated to stuff like games, music, and photos. I simply dump the data to those drives rather than the OS drive.

Anyway I personally see no reason to split an OS and it's folders to different drives when a 256gig SSD drive can easily house Windows and all its native folders just fine. You can than just get another internal or external drive for overflow.

EdvardDa said:

Wouldn't that also work for the catalogue? You can even have a backup on the interndal ssd?

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Again, a matter of "opinion". If your OS drive is the fastest drive in the system, you can simply leave your catalogue and PS scratch disk on that drive. For the record Adobe recommends these items be on the fastest drive, NOT necessarily a "separate" drive. If your SSD drive is the fastest in the system, why move it to a slower drive???

If the OS drive starts to get full, move some data from the Photos, Documents, or Music folders elsewhere. Or dedicate a drive for those items.

sygnus21 said:

EdvardDa said:

Thanks again. I might very well misunderstand this, but I have seen it recommended to keep the library (the actual photo files?) on an external drive (with one cloud backup, and one secondary external hard drive backup).

Click to expand...

This was the back in the day way of thinking when SSD storage space was small and prices high. Nowadays, with storage space increasing and prices dropping I see no reason to split the OS. Nowadays you can get a 256gg SSD drive for under a $100 bucks and have plenty of space for the OS and its native folders. Heck, even when got my first SSD drive, an OCZ 128 gig, I kept the OS and all it's folders on the drive and just moved as needed to my 2TB Western Digital hard drive.

I currently have a 512gig SSD for my OS drive with Windows 10 and all it's native folders (Photos, Documents, Music) installed there. My core programs like Photoshop, LR, and a myriad of other programs, also get installed there. Total space used.... 132gig thus far.

That said, I do have other drives in my system dedicated to stuff like games, music, and photos. I simply dump the data to those drives rather than the OS drive.

Anyway I personally see no reason to split an OS and it's folders to different drives when a 256gig SSD drive can easily house Windows and all its native folders just fine. You can than just get another internal or external drive for overflow.

Click to expand...

OP was asking about stuffing the whole collection of all photo files on the internal drive. For me with 2TB of them, that's simply not an option.

Member said:

Member said:

Wouldn't that also work for the catalogue? You can even have a backup on the interndal ssd?

Click to expand...

Again, a matter of "opinion". If you've got a fast SSD drive, you can simply leave your catalogue and PS scratch disk on the same drive. For the record Adobe recommends these items be on the fastest drive, NOT necessarily a "separate" drive. If your SSD drive is the fastest in the system, why move it to a slower drive???

If the OS drive starts to get full, move some data from the Photos, Documents, or Music folders elsewhere. Or dedicate a drive for those items.

Click to expand...

Again, I think you misunderstood partitioning with OP question, which asked about having the photos on external drive (the OS and software are still on internal drive(s) as usual)

I don't use Adobe software so I'm not sure. Assuming "collection" is the actual photos file, and "catalogue" is the indexed metadata in SQLite DB, then the "collection" can stay on external drive and the catalogue (usually smaller than 500MB) can definitely stays on internal SSD. The catalogue is just a list of filenames with their metadata/operations, mainly for fast querying/searching.

I assume that LR has the "Smart Previews" works just like "Local copies" in darktable, than it will automatically copy your working subset from external drive to internal SSD, and sync back when you connect the external drive. You then can "disconnect/delete" those Smart Preview folders when done and move on to another set of Smart Preview.

If you're disciplined with manual syncing (remember to sync periodically), then having local backup drives might makes more sense than to the cloud. I sync to my portable slim drive every day, then sync to my secondary backup at home and work once a week. Every year I let the backups run through verification overnight, if any drive showing sign of failure, just buy a new drive and clone from a good drive over, pretty quick with USB3. One time payment, about $80 for 4TB, haven't failed for 4-5 years so far.

sygnus21 said:

Austinian said:

CR's tech support data says that except for Apple and to a lesser extent Microsoft, they're all about equally dismal. :-(

Click to expand...

Unfortunately "dismal" seems to be the standard for a lot of companies (not just PC makers) and outsourcing their customer service / tech support hasn't made things better. In addition to language barriers, you have the scripts service reps are required to adhere to. Scripts requires less training and less knowledge. It's those that can think outside the script that a calling customer hopes to get. Unfortunately this is not always the case, and thus a bad customer service experience.

I kid you not, but I once had a HP tech support person tell me their monitors didn't work with ATI (AMD) GPU's. No lie. As you can see, when you don't know about the product a customer is calling about you're prone to say things that make no sense. Now you have a frustrated customer bad mouthing your company and never returning again.

Click to expand...

Scary.

The last time I had to deal with real tech support (Microsoft last year, to reactivate after new motherboard, etc. was installed) they had a chat window available.

That worked very well. The people I dealt with had quite decent written English skills. One person did phone me to confirm something, and then we had a few mutual verbal comprehension problems; worked out OK in the end, though.

Member said:

Member said:

Something else I should have added (but didn't for brevity) is that by "features" I don't only mean easily quantifiable performance aspects like CPU speed or number of USB ports, important as those are. IMO personal user-interface preferences can be even more important for long-term satisfaction. By that, I mean things like perceived display quality, keyboard, trackpad size, feel and response, noise levels, and so on.

Click to expand...

Features like those to me fall under a particular product line all vendors have. Dell with Inspiron, XPS, G-Series; Lenovo with ThinkPad, IdeaPad, Yoga, etc...

If you go with a low line product, you get low line features.

Member said:

Occasionally some of the better PC reviewers will discuss these aspects, but that is by necessity subjective opinion, and not all models even get extensive reviews.

Click to expand...

I personally use reviews, user inputs, and forums to get an idea about a product I'm interested in.

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Yes, especially when I can find serious tech-y usage details that don't show up in spec sheets.

Member said:

But reviews are a big part of the equation as user input can get emotional at times. Example this site

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No! Say it ain't so! ;-)

Member said:

Member said:

Most laptop models aren't available locally even in a fair-sized city.

Click to expand...

I looked locally but ordered direct from Lenovo with the specs I wanted. No one would have had that model, not even B&H who came close. If you're looking for a spec'd out machine, you'll probably have to go direct as I did.

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The last PC I bought came from Best Buy, but it isn't a high-end model.

I use a gaming notebook and a desktop for lightroom.

I would get a true quadcore i7 processor, discreet video card, ssd, and 16 gigs of ram.

Old Man

sluggy_warrior said:

OP was asking about stuffing the whole collection of all photo files on the internal drive. For me with 2TB of them, that's simply not an option.

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We all have opinions as well as options. And I did provide a solution. The OP may reject it, but it's still an alternative. Regardless, no one size fits all. And the OP is not you.

sluggy_warrior said:

Again, I think you misunderstood partitioning with OP question, which asked about having the photos on external drive (the OS and software are still on internal drive(s) as usual)

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I spoke on what I see as no reason to split the OS, offered an alternate solution, and provided an example - "I do have other drives in my system dedicated to stuff like games, music, and photos. I simply dump the data to those drives rather than the OS drive.".

Again, there are a myriad of ways of doing things so let's not box the OP in with one track thinking ;-)

The OP can read (revisit) what I said in case it got lost.

Peace

The Very Old Man said:

I use a gaming notebook and a desktop for lightroom.

I would get a true quadcore i7 processor, discreet video card, ssd, and 16 gigs of ram.

Old Man

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Agreed!

My XPS 15 laptop has a true quadcore i7, Nvidia GTX video card, 1 Terabyte SSD, 4K calibrated and color accurate screen and 32 Gigabytes of RAM. It's overkill for Lightroom/Photoshop CC. But it's power enough to run DaVinci Resolve Studio 4K video editing smoothly in real-time.

EdvardDa said:

silentstorm said:

In that case I think any i7 laptop with integrated graphics will do. Recommended to have 16GB ram.

And if 15" is preferable, you can check out LG Gram series of laptop, insanely very light. The 13" and 14" are below 1kg, the 15" just touched 1kg.

Click to expand...

The more I read, the more it seems to be a fully workable to go "laptop only", really. Even a fairly lightweight one that might cost more, but is available with both i7, 16gb ram and a separate graphic card.

Some remaining questions

- Does lightweigt have other disadvantages than cost (assuming the parts are all the same?). Heating issues might be more of an issue, but less so as long as most of the work is Lightroom/Photoshop that use the gpu sparingly?

- The Dell XPS 15 (for example) comes with a 4K-screen option (with better adobeRGB stats) - but will that slow down things (or cause more gpu heating issues) more than it is helpful?

- How much internal storage should be mimimum ? Many laptops seems to go with 256-512 GB SDD?

Click to expand...

If you insist on having a discrete graphics, then the weight, size, heat and power consumption will compromise with portability.

I use my Lenovo 710s with 7th gen i7cpu, 16GB ram and integrated graphics, very often for image processing. Your concerns are really a non issue. Today intel's integrated graphics is pretty good. If you can find a laptop with just the integrated Iris Plus 655 graphics, that's even better.

FWIW, my son plays Overwatch on his laptop (i5 cpu) using integrated graphics only.

You'll really appreciates the small foot print and light weight when you travel. Especially these days, airline companies have very strict hand luggage requirements and also very strict custom checks.

4K screen will definitely consumes more energy and requires more graphics power. For 13" 1080p with 100% sRGB is really good enough, there are some that has 100% aRGB.

Internal storage? For me the more the merrier. I have 1TB NVMe installed in my Lenovo, my son's laptop has a 1TB 2.5" ssd. Plenty of storage and plenty fast, also many more write cycles durability.

Choosing a laptop is really simple actually