NovaS1X

This is why I really appreciate YT channels like Project Farm.

Birding is one of those rare use-cases though where gear is pretty essential. Astrophotography is another area where better gear often does lead to better pictures. That being said, it still doesn't make up for the skill of knowing your subjects, being patient, and spending all that time setting up the perfect shot; the gear just gets you in the front door. A bird shot in bad light at a bad angle with a phone is still a bird with bad lighting and a bad angle with a 200-600mm, just in higher resolution.

My point originally was that amateurs generally spend far too much time focusing on the best gear, when they should be focusing on their subject and skillset.

>The one actual professional (as in paid as main income) photographer I know doesn't talk about the technology or the brand of camera they use at all because it's mostly moot: it's the picture and getting paid that matters. They don't carry their camera anywhere either; just an iPhone 12 mini.

>Subject matter is more interesting than the technology for me.

This has always been the case though. Amateurs and people who suffer from GAS place far too much reliance on the tool. They want to purchase the ability to create good works and become defeated when they learn they can't and quit. This has been true ever since the introduction of mass market film cameras. Many pros back in the film days carried around point and shoots or fixed lens cameras for personal use and left their F3s and 80-200mms at home.

This is just a reality of the consumer society we live in; people are advertised to incessantly and are conditioned to expect purchasing things to make them better. Thankfully art is a cathartic form of protest to this in many ways; you can't buy and compute photographic skill.

I'm semi-pro and my main gear stays at home unless I'm working on a project, personal or professional, and I carry my iPhone and a Fuji X100 for daily/personal stuff.

I think it depends on the use case.

Cameras are already downsizing, DSLRs are long dead and mirrorless are not just the future, they're now the present. I don't think size is the issue any longer.

The purpose of using a "real" camera is quality and control. If you go on IG and look as all the top photography centric accounts they're using either film or mirrorless cameras, not iPhones. The ability to manipulate RAW photos, the outright quality of better sensors and lenses, and the ease of use of "real" cameras still makes them the top choice.

When you then throw in professional use into the mix the choice becomes more obvious. Just the ergonomics alone make traditional cameras the obvious choice. I'm not going to be mounting expensive shotgun mics, matte boxes, and filters to an iPhone.

As far as computational photography goes, it's the future and all manufacturers will need to start using it to get an edge on the competition. The thing with computational photography however is that it's a data driven process, just like anything else AI; data in is data out, so the better quality of dedicated cameras simply means better data for computational methods, thus better results in the end. There's no real substitution for better lenses and sensors, because any computational method applied to a phone can also be applied to a camera.

I think there's something to be said for the lack of control with computational methods too. my iPhone for example applies a lot of processing that makes skin to me look plasticy, but it's baked into the ISP. My Fujifilm when shooting in RAW or F-Log for example doesn't have this issue. So any computational methods applied to traditional cameras need to not impede on creative control; noise reduction is an area where it would be pretty universally helpful.

Don't Look Up was fantastic. I don't think there's another movie that more accurately portrays the absurdity of modern society.

>True but how often is the battery the issue in an enterprise environment?

Biggest issue by far. We have a fleet of 100+ MacBooks in my office and expanded batteries are probably the only thing we have that goes wrong with them. They're rock solid otherwise. The new replaceable batteries is a huge deal.

Hard disagree. I work for a company of 5000+ users and we're full G-Suite now. We just went all in on Workspace.

Previous two companies (650 users, 250 users), were also gull G-Suite.

An LDAP offering that competes with AD and integrates with OSX would be gigantic. I work in VFX where 95% of our hardware runs Linux, our laptops all Apple, and the only Windows machines being the accounting department, yet we still use AD for directory services because there's simply nobody else that offers a product even half as good, and OSX doesn't even like working with AD anyway.

A product that could even compete with half of what AD offers and could manage OSX devices would be pretty incredible.

Well technically it is an Apple to Apple comparison in his case.

I know it's completely subjective, but I'm currently on a work provided 2018 mac with the 0.7mm travel and I despise it. I have far, far more typing errors on this keyboard than I do on pretty much anything else.

I'm excited to try the new 1mm keyboard.

Because it's a crap idea and design, I'll use a tablet if I want to poke at things. A touchscreen on a laptop is like driving a car with joysticks, it's not ergonomic.

Also, Apple never does things half-assed, if they put a touchscreen in they're doing for all models just like they did the touchbar.

>In case of cameras there are sdcards that are wifi enabled, and also newer cameras should support wireless transfer - isn't that easier and faster instead of pulling out the card?

No, because transferring 1TB+ of data from your camera over the crappy built in wifi chip is a much worse user experience than just plugging in an SD card. Lots of cameras also require you to connect to the camera's hot-spot, which means while transferring that data you are not on wifi. If you're just sending a few jpegs over, fine, wifi is great, but for people to whom the "Pro" moniker actually matters, it's a big deal.

Dongles are fine for sure, but having a slot built in is better, and there's no real reason not to have one other than "aesthetics"

I'm very, very happy they haven't done this yet.

Photo/video import mostly. I don't feel like transferring 1TB of data over crappy built-in wifi chip on my camera or having to plug the camera in and have it act as a fancy card reader.

It's their marketing term for their HDR tech. The XDR displays are their flagship media productivity monitors. The new screens in the 14/16 inch MacBooks have "XDR" tech as well.