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).
I plan on cleaning up the Toshiba laptop, removing its CMOS battery and installing Windows 95. Getting it back to the original software, with Photoshop 4. To emulate what it would have been like to edit on back in 1995. Although the Toshiba and Minolta combo was impressively small back in the day, it would have set you back around $30,000 (adjusted for inflation). The new combo is about a quarter of that price, although that could be cut in half again by making a couple of careful compromises. Or, if cutting weight is your primary goal, you could almost get it down to 1/3rd of the old kit, with a Thinkpad X1 Carbon g13 (985g) + Sony A7CR (515g) + Samyang 85mm f1,4 (509g) combination.
While it's true that you could edit photos on the old laptop, doing it with the track point would drive anyone up the wall. Yes you could add a mouse, but that feels like cheating and could be difficult to do on the move also. The Toshiba laptop has a wonderful old-style keyboard, but the Lenovo's is also amazing, while it also has a gorgeous trackpad, touch screen and active stylus included.

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.