Beginner Advice on laptop to use for editing

I am finally looking to purchase a laptop to edit photos ….rather than ask my son!

I am a complete novice when it comes to this, I want to know people’s advice / opinions on what I need to be able to edit my photos as I grow into editing.

I have been advised the following so far 32gb RAM 1TB storage preferably 3K display ( I have a 4k monitor already but want to be able to use laptop without relying on monitor too much). I want as much value for money and importantly be a future proof as possible.

The choices seem limited at present before price escalates.

Apologies if this has been done elsewhere but couldn’t see it elsewhere

Thanks in advance

The obvious question is why a laptop? Performance is usually crippled because of thermal issues and at upgrade time you throw away a battery, screen and keyboard as well as the computer.

If you MUST have a laptop, I'd probably look at a MacBook with M series chip. Memory 16 or 24GB ram plus a 256GB SSD and an external drive to store photos. That's probably the most bang for buck.

If you don't want an Apple (and I don't blame you one bit) then a gaming machine can be good, but it's going to be heavy and expensive with short battery life. Try to get an IPS screen if you can, for more consistent editing. With Windows 32GB of ram will be better. Look out for special offers and check the Dell Outlet rather than paying full whack.

The only point I would add is a decent dedicated graphics card with a decent amount of memory as nearly all software editing uses it and it speed up any editing functions than can make use of it, my personal preference being Nvidia. Plus side to a laptop is it is space efficient and you can take it from one place to another but I find that if you use the battery, performance drops or uses up the battery very quickly. The negatives are that it’s very limited in terms of upgrade ability usually just storage or RAM and repairs are more costly as with a desktop you can replace individual components much more easily.

A mac or something with a dedicated pretty good gpu. Everything is now heavily leaning on gpus.