Recommended laptop for Lightroom and Photoshop

[nwman97]

Looking for the latest system recommendation for Lightroom and Photoshop.  My wife processes several thousand of photos for her photography business. We have a Dell laptop that is ~3-4 years old today.  I'm open to both MacBook and Window laptop recommendations.  

[nwman97]

I'm also interested in desktop recommendations - whether macOS or Windows.  We have an HP Pavilion desktop today that is ~5 years old.   

[Jao vdL]

You can't go wrong with any recent Mac laptop. The M1 and M2 chips they use are incredibly fast, run amazingly cool (no blazing fans!), and the screens are absolutely outstanding quality with P3 gamut - very useful for photography. Just make sure you get one with at least 16 Gig of memory - 32 being preferable. The 8GB ones work but you don't get all the new GPU features in Lightroom. There is nothing like these laptops in windows world. If you go windows, which is just fine of course, pay close attention to the display. That's what most manufacturers skimp on to save costs. At least something like 2880x1800 pixels is important (1080p on a laptop for photography is not pleasant to use at all - very pixelated). 4k displays are great on bigger laptops but overkill on 14" and smaller. Make sure it has display P3 gamut. Also, if you are using Lightroom Classic, get at least 512 GB of SSD space, preferably 1TB. This is true for both windows and Macs as for speed you want to have at least your catalog on your internal SSD. You can put your images on external drives (including SSDs connected over USB-c) but just the catalog and associated previews take a lot of space. Just my previews database is over 140 GB! 

[JP Hess]

You would want a minimum of 16 GB of RAM, two hard drives (solid-state system drive and spinning secondary), as fast of a CPU as you can afford. I can't advise you on graphics processor unit.

[Conrad_C]

Mac laptop: All of the Apple Silicon models run Lightroom Classic well if they have enough Unified Memory (16GB works fine, 32GB better for a business) and internal storage (get enough so that there is always at least a couple hundred GB free for temp/swap files). If original photos/videos require an amount of internal storage that would be unaffordable, it’s fine to store them on an external hard drive. For a business, the 14" or 16" MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro processor is a safe choice for a portable workhorse that runs fast and cool. I have the base 14". 

Mac desktop: The base Mac Studio is great because out of the box you get 32GB Unified Memory, 512GB storage, and a powerful M1 Max processor. If that already meets your needs, you don’t have to pay for any upgrades.

Although it is possible to pay more for the higher-end Apple Silicon processors such as the M1 Ultra, it is often not worth the cost for Lightroom Classic. The M2 and M1 Pro/M1 Max are good enough.

PC laptop: For Intel processors, stick to the latest generation because they can more or less keep up with the latest Apple Silicon processors, and can even beat them for some things. But Intel processors tend to consume more power than Apple Silicon at the same level of performance, meaning more heat and fan noise.

PC desktop: Puget Systems builds systems tuned specifically for applications such as Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, so their recommendations for hardware component choices are helpful even if you want to spec a system from another store. I am not endorsing them, and have never been a customer, just passing on a source of info.

[TheDigitalDog]

Super happy with my new 16" MacBook Pro M1 (64GIG of RAM, maybe overkill for LR but I decided to go big for Photoshop). 10 core CPU, 32 core GPU). Super fast compared to the last (2019 MPB, Intel chip, 32 GIGs). Prices for MBP's are pretty good these days as Apple may update with M2 early next year. Hooked up to an external display (NEC SpectraView). I wanted something I could take on location and wanted a decent sized display. So far, very happy.