Figured I would ask the "brains trust", here, lol...

This is not my area of strength. Like, at all... Controversial perhaps, but, most of the time, I find computers (or rather, IT and "tech") to be... Immensely frustrating. I'm not stupid. I know the basics. I can do most things that most... "Normie" millennials can do. I just... I'm not a "build a computer from scratch" type person. Put it that way.

So when something goes wrong, like my current computer randomly losing a whole bunch of files, I... Attempt to solve it, but get increasingly frustrated when I can't. So here we are...

I'm not really a gamer, per se. I don't really watch movies on the computer, either (I know, weirdo, right?), aside from Youtube and the like (Vid Dailymotion, etc.).

I do, however, do an absolute fuck tonne of photography. Like, literally terabytes worth. Both mobile and D-SLR. In terms of "hobbies", or "interests", this, and music, are what I mainly use the computer for. Because my current computer is such an utter piece of shit (it's old, but has 1TB storage, which is a fair amount, for something a decade old), I spend... Literally days, just clearing data (photos, mainly) off it.

I also listen to a very large amount of music. Music is my passion. If I was better at it, I probably would have attempted to make a career out of it, by now. I do a little bit of mixing, but I would like to do more. If I had a better computer, I guess that's a thing I would do. Somehow the speakers on this old thing are really fucking good, though, so I would rather not lose that/have to make it external, lol... Though it's funny, because this computer is so fucked, that sometimes it crashes, when you try to load big playlists in Apple Music, lol...

Now for the more complicated stuff, which is sort of... Beyond, me. I'm not a graphics designer, but my degree, somewhat unfortunately, requires me to do a not significant amount of it. Which is shit, but so be it. Also, more broadly, a whole bunch of "digital drawing", and, hardest of all, for me personally, heaps of statistics-related programming. Heaps. Weeks worth. Which this computer simply cannot cope with (we mainly use R, if people have heard of that).

I also have to do a fuck-tonne of web-related shit, of course. Teams, fucking Blackboard, online interactive lectures, you name it. And then there's the video calling, and the more... "Academic" shit, like Endnote, and academic writing more broadly, which this computer simply cannot cope with, anymore...

Honestly, this computer is... So old, and deprecated, that I don't even think I can upgrade Office, on here, which leads to all sorts of fuckery.

Oh, and I nearly forgot: some degree of "ruggedness", would be good, because I do a surprisingly large amount of "field stuff", and I would rather the damn thing not be as fragile as this one, when I have to take it out there (obviously sparingly), lol...

So yeah. I'm a Mac "person". This is a Macbook. I mostly use an IPhone. I am not, however, "Windows illiterate". My last laptop was a Toshiba Satellite (when they were still making them), newer than this MacBook. But it was completely fucked, even from when I first got it, and ended up bricking itself, taking all my data with it, literally twice. And that, my friends, is why I spend so much time "backing up" (sadly). Having lost literally years of work, I just... Don't trust any device not to do the same, lol. So yeah. Would rather stick to the Mac "ecosystem", I think, but I can probably be swayed... Should I go for like "a custom build" (not by me, of course!!), do you think, for these sorts of needs, or do you think I can get by/away with "off the shelf"/ordered in..??

Just thought I would chuck this up, because, having lost... A not insignificant portion of data, this morning, for no apparent reason, I figure that, in desperate times, I... May as well ask some of "the brains trust" here, lol...

Thoughts, anyone??

Cheers in advance!