A working journalist in 2026 needs less hardware than at any point in Dad's career. The smart money goes on a good laptop, the phone you already own, and the cloud. Almost everything else is a want dressed up as a need.
Dad's buying rule still runs the whole show: spend on what you actually use, not on the spec sheet that impresses the bloke at Harvey Norman.
The laptop is the newsroom
This is where your money goes, because this is where the writing happens. You do not need the most expensive machine in JB Hi-Fi. You need one that is light enough to carry all day, has a keyboard you can type on for hours, and a battery that lasts a real working day. A mid-range MacBook Air or a solid Windows ultrabook does everything a reporter does, which is mostly words, browser tabs and the occasional photo edit.
The phone does half the job
Notebook, recorder, camera, filing desk. Half of what used to need separate gear now lives on the phone, which is why the other companions in this series spend so much time on it. Buy the laptop and the phone well and you have bought ninety per cent of the kit.
The cloud replaced the filing cabinet and the printer
Here is the line that would have surprised Dad most: you probably do not need a printer at all. Copy lives in the cloud, gets shared by link, and gets marked up on screen. The filing cabinet of clippings became a search box. If you print more than a handful of pages a month, a cheap home printer is fine, and most journalists will not even hit that.
The small stuff that earns its place
A second screen for editing and research side by side. A proper external keyboard if you write all day at a desk. A power bank, because a flat phone at the one moment that matters is the modern equivalent of running out of film. That is the list. Resist the rest. For the software side of the desk, read The Journalist's Digital Toolkit.
What stays the same
Buy for the job, not the spec sheet. Dad wrote that when a computer was a major purchase and a printer sat on every desk, and it has only got more true as the gear got cheaper and the choices got noisier. Read his originals: Computers: Best to Buy and Printers for Journalists.