Pretty much any of the intel i series (stay away from Celeron and pentium, they can barely run windows, let alone applications on top of it). will be able to handle streaming. Video editing and photoshop are going to be what are going to decide what you buy imo, both of them like a lot of ram, so you are going to want something with as much ram as possible, I would say the minimum is 16gb but they will basically use whatever you have avalibule. They will run with 8gb but will be noticeably slower in my experiance, especially when rendering texters and larger files.
The biggest factor in whats going to work best for you is going to depend mainly on the software you want to run and not just the type of program but the actual application. Different programs use the system differently to achieve what seems to the user as the same result. OFC the other alternative would just be to get the highest spec machine you can (which tbh is never a bad choice as it should be able to handle anything extra that you decide to do with it in the future.).
One thing that the gaming laptops do still offer that makes them worth looking at is the improved cooling over ultra lights and other laptops. generally they have bigger fans and better overall cooling solutions, and the cooler you can run the computer the better it preforms.
Personally I would be looking at something like this:
Buy Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Gaming Laptop, 16" WQXGA 165Hz Display, AMD 8-Core Ryzen 7 5800H (Beat i7-11800H), GeForce RTX 3060 6GB, 32GB RAM, 512GB PCIe SSD, USB-C, HDMI, RJ45, WiFi 6, RGB, Keypad, Win 11 with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!
www.newegg.com
I use Davinci Studio which uses hardware encoding along with photoshop, and indesign for design work along with camming. Most of the specs on that laptop are mainly to have a smoother video editing experiance and faster encoding times. If you wanted to save some $ on that price though I would look at maybe a ryzen5 or intel i5, with an rtx 3050ti or gtx 1660 (they will give noticeably increased video rendering times if you are using a program that uses hardware encoding, you would proberly be looking at an extra 30-50% on the encoding times) and drop the ram amount to 16gb. It would proberly save you like $500 or so but IMO I would say the faster encode times is worth the $500.
For photoshop and other design programs the biggest difference would be in the time loading large texture files and preview updates, loading of large assets etc, otherwise those changes wont make too much of a difference. IMO it's worth having the dedicated GPU even if right now you arnt doing video editing as it leaves that option open to you in the future. (you can do video editing without a dedicated gpu but the encoding times are usually around double from what I have found).
Side note: watch out if you are purchasing through amazon, sellers on there (and ebay and basically any other 3rd party market place will just list things as i5 or i7 or ryzen 5 or ryzen 7 without telling you the model number. some of the laptops listed on amazon for over $1000 are close to 10 years old at this point but the sellers know that they thing people are looking for is just that it's an i7 laptop because thats what they were told to buy, retail stores also do this I have found although not quiet as bad, with a retail store you might end up with something thats 3-4 years old instead of 8-9). For reference the newest ryzen models with be 5000 series (so things like 5900, 5700 etc), and intel will be model numbers stating with 11. So if you see a laptop thats like i7 3200, it's really not going to be worth picking up.
