Very pleased with the new laptop. Ready for the fast pace of our corporate job this week.

Statuary in Dresden, Germany.

Samsung Galaxy NX camera.

It was a zoo at the Apple store on Friday when I went to pick up the new MacBook Pro I ordered online. I chose, inadvertantly, to pick up my computer from the neighborhood Apple store on the very day that Apple's new phones were released to all the people who pre-ordered them. I don't know what Apple's initial sales numbers on the phones are but the traffic was enough to crash their fulfillment servers across North America.

Laptop computers fulfill three functions for me. I don't use them to do heavy post process "lifting" for either photographs or video, instead I use them: In my favorite chair in order to read stuff on the NYT, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal websites, as well as my favorite blog sites. I use laptops when I am on location for clients who require tethered shooting or super fast (on site) turnaround of files. Finally, I seem to buy a new laptop every time I start on a book project. The gap between my previous machine and this one was almost seven years; years in which I did not start any new book projects.

My main impetus for buying a new machine right at this moment was the project I'll be working on this Weds., Thurs., and Friday. I have a need to shoot photos and videos throughout the three days while quickly uploading selections for concurrent display across a range of social media sites for my client. I did the same thing for the same client last year and the narrow point of the funnel was, inevitably, the speed of my laptop. I decided, this year, that life is too short to wait around for older processors and tired hard drives to do their work....

Dresden, Germany

The new machine uses an 8th generation processor, an SSD drive and the memory is twice as big and also much faster. The one downside of the model I chose is that there are only two USB-3/Thunderbolt ports. I bought a dongle which gives me back three USB3 ports as well as an SD card reader and that's just about all I need for the machine. At some point in the future I'll buy an adapter that will allow me to connect an HDMI cable for those times when I need to connect to a large screen TV for a presentation. I may actually have a USB3 to HDMI adapter sitting around anyway.....

The machine delights me most when I go to start it up and it only takes seconds instead of minutes. Seems like magic to me. I am now dragging out some of the SSDs I bought for the Atomos Ninja Flame to use as externals. Solid State is fun.

To those who conjecture that I could have saved a fortune if I'd only been willing to abandon Apple I have to look at the numbers. Seems to me I might have saved money on hardware but spent it back replacing software. Even so I might have been able to save $150 by buying a much uglier machine but since I seem to keep them for up to seven years we'd really only be talking about $10.20 per year in savings and you have to take into consideration that I'd have to look at it everyday during those seven years. Aesthetics does count for something or I've terribly misjudged the potential of what photographers do for a living. 

Next up we'll work on replacing the desktop but that's not going to happen until 2019. Can't shove all the fun into one year....