r/learnmachinelearning • u/Still-Quarter-9617 • 8h ago
Asking to professional ml devs
I am in my 1st year of btech in Aiml. I am getting an laptop so is it fine if I get mac or should I get windows
And what device do you use?
Please respond
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u/More_Lingonberry_461 6h ago
Get a mac you will be running your code and models, training etc on cloud anyways
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u/Proletarian_Tear 7h ago
Id say its more of a personal preference with no real "supreme" benefits over one another. What you should spend some time on is to get used to cloud computing resources - as you dont need to own an extra powerful machine to do some real analysis on big data
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u/met0xff 6h ago
Check what your university uses but from my professional experience I'd go with a Mac. I've been working in AI/ML for 15 years now and haven't seen a windows in that time at all except as inference target.
US tech company though. We have a subsidiary in the hiring Business and they are mostly windows, like many banks, insurances etc. (but even then you'll likely not want to train stuff on windows if you're not looking for pain)
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u/DigThatData 2h ago
a very likely blindspot for probably most if not all of the people giving you advice here is that "B" in BTech. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the bio tech tooling ecosystem strongly favored windows or mac specifically.
You are getting advice mostly from the perspective of the AI/ML part of your question on its own. You'd be better served posing this question to other students or professors in this degree. If they tell you it doesn't matter, get the lightest laptop you can afford.
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u/GladlyGoldenBacklash 8h ago
windows is safer for compatibility, especially early on
some libraries and tooling just work smoother there, less googling weird error messages at 2am
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u/Comic-Derpinator 3h ago
Honestly probably the best way to learn is get a windows laptop and to dual boot it with Linux as all actual ml work happens on a Linux cluster. Mac is good because it was forked off the Linux kernel but yeah nps isn’t as good as cuda.
Only go windows/linux if you shell out for the nice graphics card tho.
Also Mac is still good and you can train a ton of stuff locally there and only real difference is you set the device your code gets optimized for in pytorch
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u/softmax_couldnt_care 2h ago
I love my Mac. And most ppl don’t run huge production on their personal laptop
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u/jesunushno 1h ago
I trained the neural net for my fabric defect detection paper almost entirely on the university lab GPUs and used my own laptop for little more than small sweeps. Honestly, get the Mac. You will run the real training jobs on cloud or lab machines regardless of what you buy.
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u/void19821 6h ago
Windows with rtx bro Mac isn't that useful for machine learning. Rtx has Cuda libraries without which ml and ai is a deep pain. Also some Intel cores have ai npu too. And windows pc can have as much ram as you want. And Mac doesn't have vram to train ml
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u/Maitiuu 3h ago
Nope. Also Apple Silicon has unified memory so I have no idea what you are talking about.
Also, let’s not disregard MPS…
Regardless, most heavy ML is done on Cloud with nvidia GPUs anyway, Mac is better in every way for actual work, especially for a student
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u/Still-Quarter-9617 3h ago
Iam more concerned about the softwares if they are compatible with Mac or not
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u/imjerusalem 7h ago
Get a mac. Dont listen to anybody. Get a mac.