But why does he need a smartphone? Is it because his education demands it or all his friends have one and he wants it?

It is good to keep one updated in terms of technology and content but having a smartphone at such a young age is probably not a good idea. But if he insists, 13 or 14 series would do. Personally, he can make use of the iPad or a Galaxy Tab for both studying and movies or games. I remember sharing my phone with my brother when I was 16. It was a Sony K310i, oh man, the fun we had using that phone, having an IR blaster to transfer mp3 files haha.

Hey Buddy,

You can just shoot in 4k60fps and that footage would be crisp and perfect. ProRes is basically for people who wish to tweak the details in the video like improving highlights or white balance change, etc. I would say it is not that useful and if your videos are recorded in a well-lit room you are totally fine to use the 4k60fps option. For storage, you can use an HDD or SSD, and store it safely, and let people know where to find it and it is best not to encrypt or password-protect the storage. Sometimes shit happens with password protection and we don’t want that now. Multiple copies are appreciated.

You are doing a great job as a dad and I am sure your daughter will cherish all the effort you are putting in, to make her happy. I wish you all the warmth you can get.

I don’t own an iPhone, but your best bet would be to clean your lens using a microfiber cloth. Open the camera app, point it towards street light (at least 2 sources of light), and then wipe the camera lens from a single direction. Now you will see the lines change direction, do this multiple times until the lines become faint. Dont randomly rub your camera lens, do it gently from one direction to other. Sometimes, if it is too dirty (or greasy), use a drop of water and then rub it and then use a dry microbifer and gently wipe it.

If you plan to keep it for 5 years or more, better go with the 14th Gen. The difference in pricing is not that huge.

In terms of benchmarks, my 12700H seems to beat the M1 Max in almost all the benchmarks (excluding the GPU). So, there is no doubt that your 13700K would destroy M1 Max. But, optimization is the key, Microsoft seems to be doing a fairly good job recently to optimize and fine-tune Windows. IMO, if Microsoft spent some amount of their time optimizing Windows, they would clearly beat MacOS. No doubt about that.

Not true. PCIE Gen 4 SSDs can go to 6 GB/s (or even more). Even Apple’s most expensive laptop I guess is limited to 4.5 GB/s (if I am right). Their recent M3 SSDs go up to like 4GB/s (as shown by MaxTech).

When you feel things are not functioning the way it is. On laptops, I previously jumped from 3rd Gen (i5-3210M) to 8th Gen (8550U), and now currently on 12th Gen (12700H+RTX 3060). Buying the U series was a mistake, if not I would have not gotten my 12th Gen laptop and probably bought a new one with the 14th Gen. My guess is, every 5-6 years should be good enough. Anything less than 3 years is not recommended unless you really need to extract and use every bit of processing power that the new gen delivers.

For the gaming scenario, most games above 1080p are GPU throttled and not CPU, so you might not gain a lot. My 12700H literally has the same performance as your 10700K and I would wager a guess, that it can last for 2-3 more years at least. Use the money to get a new GPU (if you game), or a better monitor.