Originally Posted by
Yokohama
...thinking of investing in a Mac portable and a large external display, rather than an iMac this time. For those who have gone this route, can you help with the following questions, please?
1. Any major issues to look out for?
2. What ex. display are you using and would you buy the same brand again?
3. What do you miss about going portable vs using a desktop? And will you continue with portable computing?
I went from Mac Pro plus Powerbook to solely a 17" matter display 2011 Macbook Pro driving a 24" Viewsonic display. I made the move because a fully safe Aperture (now killed by Apple; damn) workflow was less than ideal when using two computers, and I do need to maintain mobile capability.
Thanks to Thunderbolt, that MBP and its 15" sister were the first laptops capable of being true full-strength desktop replacement (DTR) laptops. SSD, 16 GB RAM and i7 make the top MBPs since January 2011 great DTR boxes. I have been doing heavy images work on that setup for 5 years now, and perceive no weakness from the hardware except an inability to use Handoff with iPhone and iPad.
I use the MBP keyboard and trackpad (no mouse, but with an external BT Satechi keypad) with the MBP screen open and immediately below the larger external display, all on a large home-built 44" high stand-up desk. I do use both displays, set to the same resolution and not mirrored. I move windows back and forth between the displays as suits the tasks that I am working on at the time. If the external display is disconnected all open windows just default back to the MBP screen.
Much of my work involves images, which means lots of mass storage and complex off-site backup. Having a single DTR box actually facilitates that because the hard drives at the fixed base location are always being disconnected when the DTR laptop goes mobile.
1. Any major issues to look out for?
- Buy only the top MBP available, with maximum RAM and best available GPU; ignore low end boxes. IMO largest available SSD + a portable drive that travels with the MBP, but I deal with enterprise-critical images and your workflow
might get by with less. All that is pricey (more than an iMac), but in my case it has amortized over 5 years already and still strong.
- Laptops are by definition exposed to far, far more risk than desktops. Backup religiously on and off site, and have a quickly implementable plan for what happens when (not if,
when) the laptop is stolen or blows up. Consider theft/fire insurance if self-insuring is not comfortable for you.
- Consider how the the laptop display may look side-by-side (or above/below like my setup) with your choice of external display. As an images person issues like display glare, color variation, etc. irritate me very much. However many non-images folks flat do not care.
- You may choose to just use the external display when at your fixed base, in which case the MBP screen can be left closed. Personally even when I do not want the MBP display on (e.g. watching Netflix) I leave the MBP open for best heat removal with the screen set to mirror and brightness at zero.
- My MBP does get very hot when in full-on DTR mode and doing images work using the external display. All my earlier Mac laptops also got very hot under heavy usage. None failed due to heat but this 2011 MBP did have a GPU problem that presented a month ago that Apple repaired for free as part of a known GPU issue.
2. What ex. display are you using and would you buy the same brand again?
Mine is Viewsonic, which was great value in 2011 but it depends on what size and color quality
you need and 2016 displays have evolved a lot. The cost range for displays is huge because the color quality range is huge. I would start from scratch evaluating new displays today but yes I would consider Viewsonic as well as others like Apple. No Dell.
Actually the internal display of the laptop is also important to those of us who care about displays, because the laptop display gets used in lots of different not-always-ideal lighting, whereas you can set up the lighting at your fixed base. Apple Stores are set up to make the displayed laptops look good, but pick the laptop up and move it around to see how bad the glare is. There has been large variance among different built-in MBP displays.
3. What do you miss about going portable vs using a desktop? And will you continue with portable computing?
The
only thing I miss is having 5 hard drives hidden in the MP tower instead of cables everywhere, but I could do that now with a multi-drive enclosure if I felt like it.
Portability has huge value add to me, enough to be considered
mandatory. Obviously taking the laptop to jobsites, edu, etc.; but also even just the ability to sit in the living room with a laptop in-lap is very convenient; or to sit in my office with laptop in-lap when I get tired of standing at the desk. I will always be portable but might again add a MP to the mix at some point if a suitable images workflow were to evolve.
Edit: I have 2 friends that each use iMacs and prefer them because they want their computer work to be
only in one place (which would drive me crazy). Different folks have different preferences.
HTH
-Allen