I got a "ship ASAP because I'm screwed" MacBook Pro 15" a year ago. It
has 500GB of SSD, and 16GB of RAM. I have to say, it is the fastest
computer I've ever owned, although there are some now that are faster.
One of my most common tasks (building with 45,000 files, of which a
handful have changed) used to take at least 20 minutes on my Dell 5
years ago and the MBP does it in 100 seconds. I think most of the credit
for that goes to the SSD. It's also a retina display, so with reading
glasses and a magnifying glass it becomes a 'big' monitor 😜.
For auxiliary disks, go with Thunderbolt or USB 3. I just bought a 64GB
thumb drive for a bootable backup drive for about $35. Several of those
could be useful.
Twevesouth.com sells a little kit of plugs for the power adapter so you
can get power no matter what the frequency or voltage of the locality.
They also include a USB outlet capable of recharging a phone or tablet.
When I'm overseas but on a wireless network, I can make a phone call
that appears to be originating in the US. This uses our company IP phone
system, but I'm sure there a individual plans. We use RingCentral, which
charges $25/month for a single phone, which can be a program on an
iPhone.
Hope this helps.
—Barry
On 3 Jan 2015, at 15:18, Steve Smith wrote:
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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