If you're looking at an RTX4070 laptop with an i7 or i9 CPU then my advice is to skip the thin models because they will throttle due to insufficient cooling capacity.
I have a Thinkpad P1 (gen 4) and while it's a great machine the laws of physics means it just cannot move sufficient volume of air to keep everything cool enough during long, intensive tasks (I had an X1 Extreme before, which is basically the same machine). I've since bought a smaller laptop for general portability and day-to-day stuff and will eventually replace my P1 with a heftier workstation-class machine that'll be mainly desk-bound and has better cooling -- something like the P16 series or Dell Precision 7680 or similar. Whatever the case, it'll still be a laptop and this you're always going to hear the fans crank up when it's under stress, more so than a tower that has bigger fans and more air circulation.
I've bought the Lenovo Legion 7i (2024), with the core i9 14900HX, an RTX4070, 1TB of storage and put 96GB of ram in it.
That's a powerful laptop, but also an annoyingly noisy one. As soon as you do anything that makes the cpu increase it's speed a tiny bit, even as light as loading a few tabs in a web browser, the fans kick in, with a high speed (just to be sure they spin), then reduce their speed to a more manageable level a second later. They spin during a minute or two then stop. One minute later they start again. That's awful if you work in a silent environment, the laptop spends his time between being silent and noisy which makes it very noticeable, and even when you use the quiet setting. I tried to set the fans to always run, but it's annoying. I also tried some specific tools to better set the fans speed, like make them start only at a higher temp, but it makes the whole laptop too hot to my taste and just reduce the time before they start spinning, but it does not solve the problem.
So I sent it back to Lenovo
I may try a Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i when it'll be available, with a Core Ultra 9 CPU, which is known to be less power hungry (and less powerful). The Asus G16 (still only 32GB of soldered ram) seems to be noisy as the first online reviews explain. The 4080 version may be more silent as they use a vapor chamber, but I don't need such a powerful graphic card, and it is way too expensive (4000€).
I also discovered that Lightroom performances on the import and export tasks on Apple silicon processors are waaayyy faster than on pc's. It is probably due to the fact that the memory is shared between the cpu and gpu cores, but it is strange that there is such a huge difference for example on the 1:1 previews as this is a cpu only task. And it is true even on less powerful Macs. A simple Macbook air M3 crushes any pc on those import/export tasks.
A video with those import/export times of macbooks and one of the most powerful PC laptop (razer)
That made me think again on buying a macbook, why not a lower spec'd one (My initial ideal configuration was MBP 16/M3max/64GB of fram/2TB SSD which is around 5500€, way too expensive for me). Maybe something like a M3 macbook air with 24GB of ram and 1TB ssd, or a M3Pro macbook pro with 36GB of ram and 1TB SSD if I can find the money for it (3459 € the M3Pro 12/18 where I live!!!)...
I fear that the Macbook air would not be very suited for the long import/export sessions as I have to import sometimes 1000 to 5000 photos at the same time (pro shoot, back from vacation, ...).
I also fear that the GPU/NPU side for AI tasks (AI denoise, subject recognition...) would be very slow. That's the other side of the coin: it seems that Lightroom is very slow on those tasks on lower end Apple silicon chips. For example on the linked video, on a M3 (non pro) it takes more than 1 minute to denoise a 36mpix RAW while it takes only 23 seconds on a pc laptop with a RTX4070. Even on a beefier M3pro (12/18) it is still 42 seconds, almost double the time.
A little update as I have now bought a Macbook Pro 16" M3 Pro 12/18 with 36 GB of FRAM and 1 TB of storage and used it for almost a month.
As expected the results are in line with the video above: LR is at least as fast as the top end PC laptop I tried before (14900HX / RTX4070) on the import and export tasks. But I really really love how silent the computer is. The fans never spin, unless the import/exports tasks take more than a minute or two. And even then the noise is manageable and not unpleasant as the PC I had before. It is almost unbelievable to use the computer a whole day without any noise! I'm delighted.
On AI tasks the Macbook is slower, but I still use LR Classic 13.2. I'm not an early adopter on those things. As it seems that the performance increased a lot with the latest version I think it will then be really close to what the laptop PC was achieving, which is great.
Overall the performance of the Macbook in lower than the PC, and the price is way higher, but for what really matters to me when it comes to speed (LR), it is on par.
About RAM (I had 96GB on the PC laptop, now only 36 on the Mac), until now it is ok. I hope it still will be in 5 years. Time will tell. Memory pressure is almost always green, unless I start to be a little bit too confident and keep open at the same time 2 web browsers with hundreds of tabs, a local LM Studio AI model, LR, Photoshop and Davinci Resolve at the same time. Maybe I kept bad habits from my overly ram-fed pc's (do not close an app if you plan to continue to use it in the coming hours/days).
Of course Mac OS is not Windows (and vice-versa) and it takes time to adapt or find solutions to some silly problems in Mac OS, but after a while you adapt and don't really care. An OS is not what makes a computer. For me at least, it is more the combination between the hardware (performance, silence) and the software that counts. And on that side I can't deny that the Macbook delivers!
