Eric -
As a Mac person, she doesn't have *lots* of choices, for better and/or
worse:
I can't imagine traveling without a screen/keyboard, depending on the
kindness of strangers to provide a display and a keyboard, so I'd say
MacBook Air or MacBook Pro is the *only* choice.
With internal SSDs on the Pro's there probably isn't that much reason to
go with the Air unless portability is her highest concern.
A 13" could be sufficient but they top out at i5 dual-core with Intel
Graphics. To get i7 Quad with nVidia Graphics she has to go to the high
end 15" which impacts portability.
Software compatibility should not be an issue. OS compatibility might
be. If she is running older software to avoid the subscription model,
that my keep her from running too new of an OS Rev... but likely not,
it usually goes the other way (new software won't run on an old OS Rev).
A safari-vest full of high density HDD or SSD (preferably thunderbolt)
and SD (or other) memory cards should take care of the rest. The
speed/latency of SSD over thunderbolt rivals SSD over PCIE and I believe
beats HDD over PCIE. Keeping a baseline bootable SSD with all her
software is probably a good measure and it is possible she can even boot
from that on another Mac of similar OS Rev, but much of her software may
be keyed to CPU or Mac, not Drive... so lots of license shenanigans
might be required to take advantage of that.
My 4Pi colleagues from England/Spain travel the world just like she is
planning, doing similar (if not even more processor/data demanding)
tasks. Their main advantage over her is there are two of them, so each
has a machine as instant backup or overflow for the other...
They also are prepared to order up a replacement machine "overnight" on
demand and tend to do so once every 1-2 years, implying a full refresh
of their hardware every 2-4 years. They also use up camera bodies
(DSLR's have a shutter-lifetime and doing 9-shot HDR 360's is a good way
to run through that!).
She might very well, however go a long way with just an Air or smaller
Pro and 2 thunderbolt SSDs. I do that myself (but with less intense
demands) all the time (1 SSD, 4 HDDs).
- Steve
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