New laptop or Virtual desktop?

[theboyfold]

I'm looking for a laptop to replace my now dead 2014 Mac Book Pro. It was a great laptop, did everything I needed. Essentially it has enough grunt to run Lightroom / Photoshop and do some lightweight video editing.

Looking at laptops today. Mac Book Pros are out of reach cost wise. The world of PC laptops is so confusing it just puts me off. I like the look for the Asus Zenbook Book Pro, but it's not available anywhere. A friend of mine suggests an Asus gaming machine he uses for video work, but the battery life is woeful.

A friend of mine has suggested that I look at Virtual Desktops, running GPU intensive applications on AWS or Azure is now an option
My worry is about the location of the media, I have very fast download, but not not upload (thanks Virgin).

The budget for a laptop is around £1200 with room for wiggle and a bit of man maths.

I'm open to ideas. If you are going to suggest a laptop, I'd expect latest gen i7, decent SSD and ideally a 2nd HDD. Decent battery life and portability would be considered a big plus.

Or a decent screen and something that can run a virtual desktop (once I've learnt about them...)

[theboyfold]

Troubleatmill said:

Why not get your MB Pro fixed?

Wasn't interested at the time. I wanted to see how I could get on without one for a bit.