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In ordinary photography, target selection eats better gear for breakfast. Needless to say, specialist stuff requires specialist gear (e.g. underwater photography, fast sports shots, long-distance animal documentary filming). For a lot of application scenarios, today´s mobile phone cameras are amazing for what they can do, how small and affordable they are. More often than not, one's best shots are spontaneous, and the only camera around will be the one in one's smartphone. In contrast, in many sports (not chess, perhaps!), e.g. a better table-tennis bat matters enormously. As they say, a match won is attributed to one's technique, a match lost is blamed on the bat (never heard a photographer blame anything on their camera or wideangle lense!). In software engineering and writing, a good laptop matters enormously. Among the properties { keyboard, screen, battery, RAM, CPU, SSD }, keyboard and battery life are the most crucial elements to me, followed by RAM and SSD size followed by screen and CPU. In the past, ¨faster CPU¨ would have been higher up on the list, but even today's slowest machines are already very fast! Whatever you do, new/better gear make it more fun! So if you want your kids to enjoy the new school year, buy them new colors or a new school bag. |