Laptops
As much as I love building and using desktop PCs, laptops have gradually become my favourite way to edit photography and write articles for my website. Below, I will talk about some of the models that made an impact on me, but first I thought it would be nice to bookend this whole article around an image. This represents 30 years of portable digital photography, on the sofa or on the move...
This is my newest and oldest laptop with corresponding camera to illustrate what editing was & is like on the road. I bought these laptops in the same month (June 2025) I could find very little info about either due to them being too old and new (respectively).
After removing the Toshiba's CMOS and suspend batteries, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 95. After a bunch of driver setup, I also installed Photoshop 4.0 so that I could do some editing. As you'll see from the image above, the photo from the Minolta has been lightly tweaked using "Adjustment Layers", which was a new feature in Photoshop 4.0.
The old combo (above) would have set you back around $30,000 (adjusted for inflation), which is several times more than the new one, and that could be reduced to around one tenth without affecting the performance too much.
While it's true that you could edit photos on the old laptop, doing it with the track point would drive anyone crazy. Yes, you could have added a Wacom tablet, but that would not have been easy to use on the move. The Toshiba laptop has a wonderful old-style keyboard, but the new Lenovo's is also amazing, while it also has a great trackpad, touch screen and active stylus.
2005
I bought my first laptop when I started my first job in a new country. I tried to buy a custom laptop before moving away from the UK, but both 'Mesh' and 'Rock Direct' failed to make me one by the date they promised, so I ended up buying this POS in Amsterdam. I thought that I could travel back to the UK with it, but it was a 17" version with a GPU so that never worked out. It was hot, heavy, noisy, not that fast, the battery didn't last too long and the keyboard sucked, but that's gaming laptops for you.
2011
I didn't get into laptops again until I realized that small and light ones were more my thing. This little Alienware M11X-R1 was more like a powerful netbook. I bought this a year after it came out in 2010 for half price (£450). I remember being very impressed with it.
2011
Shortly after, in the same year, I bought this Dell Onyx. Also for £450 this was about 1/3 of the original price. Damn this was a sexy machine, even if it didn't last too long on battery and the keyboard wasn't too great to type on.
2013?
I bought this Lenovo Thinkpad for its stylus support for art. Although that never worked out I absolutely loved it for its keyboard and I would be forever hooked on that typing experience, even if I didn't stick with them.
2015 - 2022
My next few laptops were a bit boring. I had some Sony's, Dells and Acer ones, but none of them wowed me...
2023
This Acer (Swift 16) is a rather double-edged sword. It gets too hot, then noisy, battery life is very disappointing, USB 4 support was a lie and the keyboard is terrible. I loved that it was centred (no number pad), but with its short key travel and frequent missing of key-presses it was infuriating to type on. All that said, the 16" 4K OLED screen was gorgeous, and it miraculously weighed under 1.2KG. For photographers wanting to travel light, it is a wonderful beast. Not cheap back in 2023, but the updated version looks much improved. It's less expensive now, with much more efficient CPUs, better ports etc. I might have been tempted if it had pen support.