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The 16” M2 Pro 16/512 is a little over 2K € NOS here in Slovakia incl. 20% VAT which gets refunded of course if you buy as a company. When you mention the enclosures, @jerryy, for 40MPix files perhaps the 10Gbps enclosures are better because they are plenty fast IMHO and they spend less power (about 200mA as opposed to 500mA for the 40Gbps ones, for the ones I have measured), so when you run on battery that makes a difference. Fewer charging cycles, longer battery lifespan. Maybe they are plenty fast for 100Mpix files too, perhaps someone can chime in with their experience. But talking about the 10Gbps ones, you may just as welľ buy a Samsung T9 which will be equally fast and maybe even cheaper, depending on what NVMe drives you happen to have at hand. Also, you could connect the drive to a hub with its own power supply, but they usually charge the computer full time through the Thunderbolt port so if you are a purist and want to cycle your battery kindly, somewhere between 20-80% to prolong its life expectancy, the hub will disrupt your strategy. 😁 But do not despair, Acasis makes an eclosure/minihub which takes external power from an USB charger but does not charge the laptop so you can charge that extra to your heart´s content. Maybe automate that through a smart plug based on battery level events. 😁 A beautiful world we have, don’t we. Computers are great, they help us solve problems we didn’t have without them.

Yup, computers beyond the “get you in the door entry level” are expensive. It is even worse for the computers game-players use, believe it or not. The entry level disposable ones that are limited in what you can use them for beyond reading email and watching videos go on sale every other day though. Right now, the time of this posting, you can get the 14 inch MacBook Pro M3 - 24GB ram - 512GB SSD for US $1999 directly from Apple or maybe a little less from one of the resellers, guessing you are close to where $US have meaning. The USB-4 or Thunderbolt 4 NVME enclosure @George_P mentions is a very good add-on. You can put a pretty large SSD in them, and use that as your main storage.

good lord that's the cost of a 55/1.7! might have to wait for the costs to come down. here's hoping they announce a new gen. Going to add those specs to camelcamel & set an alert for <2k. thanks for the input, gents.

I don't know about RAV POWER batteries in particular but some batteries can swell up - I generally use an external charger and keep an eye on them

A focus stacked image of a flowering Kalanchoe

Get as much ram as you can afford. It seems just about all of the manufacturers are soldering the ram onto the motherboard these days instead of giving you slots and letting you make the choice later. sigh. If you going with a MacBook, there is not much difference between the M2 and M3 cpu versions, (some seconds of processing speed-up instead of many minutes). The ram amount still matters a whole lot, things slowdown once the ram gets used up and the working files are subsequently swapped back and forth to the hard drive. There is a rumored M4 version that will be out any day now, 😀. An underrated factor is the fan, as to whether or not it has one, the Air version does not have one, the Pro version does have one. When you start messing with large files, the computer generates a lot of heat, so if it lacks a fan, it will slow things down to keep from cooking itself to death. (The ones with fans will also slow things down after a while if the heat does not dissipate fast enough.) How much slowdown depends on what you are doing. Best wishes.