I'm thinking about a new laptop for my travels. I'm typing this on an AMD-equipped Tosh netbook which cost me £300 around 18months ago and has been a revelation. It's quick enough for browsing, office and 720p video. It has HDMI out for when I'm in the UK and I'm near a TV. It lasts a good 6 hours on battery with standard use and the keyboard feels great (for a netbook). It has three problem areas: 1) Can't run Photoshop/Lightroom (and I do freelance photography at the moment, so that's important) 2) Can't game (hardly a deal breaker, but would be nice to an extent) 3) A little slow when multitasking (but again, that's to be expected in this market segment). I'm currently sharing an apartment with a friend in the Italian Alps and we shoot photos of people skiing and boarding and then sell them for a living. I built my friend a mini-ITX machine for us to share whilst we're here. It has a 128gb SSD, 16gig of fast RAM, and an i5 with HD4000. It runs lightroom sweetly, is blindingly fast and plays 1080p and CoH: Opposing Fronts no probs. So that's got me thinking about when we part ways at the end of the season. She will take the shoebox back to Denmark and I'll be screwed for travelling. I'll need something with i5/7 8/16gig ram and an SSD, but mostly, it needs a decent display. Love the look of the Asus G75, but the panel is TN, right? I need colour accuracy and if I have to lose a discrete GPU to get it, I can cope with that. But without spending £2000 on a top end business workstation, can you get decent displays on "normal" laptops??
Sorry to say but there are not many IPS displays for 'normally' priced laptops. Reasons for this are: 1) IPS displays are still relatively expensive 2) They eat battery faster than TN panels 3) Most consumers won't pay (extra) for them
Apple MacBook Pro 13" with Retina Display, especially when gaming is not important. It's still doable by dual-booting Win7 tho, but the HD4000 isn't exactly ment for gaming. So maybe the 15" version with discrete graphics.
Here's a list, it's from 2011-2012, so it's worth checking the updated models still have IPS panels: http://www.laptopreviews.com/laptop...isplay-laptops-and-where-to-find-them-2011-12
Thanks guys. I was worried it was gonna be a Mac. Can't really afford it, but at the end of the day, if dual boot is fast, I suppose I could stand to learn a new OS and have another string to my technological bow. The HD4000 copes with CoH, so probably Starcraft 2 and I imagine some other stuff at low settings. But my main concern is Lightroom, overall speed and display quality. My netbook does everything else perfectly well. Thin & light is unnecessary really, as my netbook is more portable at 10" anyway... I'll check out that list.
Ah, was going to ask if you've got one of the late 12" models netbook but no.. Shame as I'm still looking for on (now that they're not beeing built anymore)
I wanted one of those too! Very hard to get hold of. In all honesty, this thing really has been (and continues to be) pretty damn good for most things. I just need a better display and a little more juice. Seems from that list that it is, in fact, VERY hard to get a decent display for photography work. The "workstation" notebooks from HP an Dell are even mroe expensive than a top gaming machine - which seems ridiculous to me. Looks like Mac is hilariously the cheapest option. I really thought that with all these awesome tablet displays out there, people would be demanding more from their laptops. Apparently not
