Welcome to the Booth!
I can echo the Windows updating is dangerous. I know more than a couple people who have been bitten by spontaneous upgrades or updates installing that were not prompted nor welcomed. These may be isolated incidents but in the realm of mission critical production equipment, there's certainly some amount of risk here.
For my laptop, I'm on a Macbook Pro, the last rev before they pulled the
HDMI and USB off. I find it much more stable and capable than my last Windows 7 laptop. I don't mind carrying adapters because I use my laptop for connecting into all kinds of systems so I always have to have a bag of RS232, RJ45,
HDMI,
VGA, 3.5mm audio, and so forth with me anyway. The only one I find myself ever using consistently is the Thunderbolt/
Ethernet adapter.
If I didn't have a USB port, I could see myself needing that
adapter intermittently for flash drives but most of the time it would live in the bottom of my bag. My philosophy is that any data on flash drives or on my laptop is sacrificial because it's so easy to lose a laptop or a flash drive. Any sensitive data is backed up over Dropbox to my home PC, which constantly backs up to the cloud over Crashplan. Between Dropbox/Crashplan/Teamviewer, so long as I have internet I can access any file in my possession on any computer I have. Really eases the burden because I only carry files with me for active work. Anything in my archives from old projects stays on my home or work PC. If I'm working on something on-site and need a
light plot from 2 years ago, I just remote into either of those PC's,
throw it into Dropbox, or log into Crashplan and download directly.
The hardest I push it is either with
Qlab or when I'm programming/tuning a sound
system. Being able to run Windows under Parallels on one IP subnet, with the
Mac side on WiFi and hard-lined into a separate IP subnet, I can
bounce back and forth between multiple networks or multiple subnets within the same
network without
tripping over anything. I have not yet discovered a faster or at least equivalent workflow on a Windows box where I can have that kind of streamlined flexibility.
It'll really come down to your workflow, but for how I operate, the Macbook Pro suits my needs more appropriately than a Windows laptop, even without all the ports we've all become accustomed to.