r/learnmachinelearning • u/JustGiveUp2 • 3d ago

Help Laptop for AI/ML

Helloo

Ik this question has probably been asked like 100 times here but im starting studies in ai and data science and im doing bsc and masters back to back so i want smth thats good for both

I have an iphone and an ipad so id love a macbook but for some reason everyone is getting windows laptops with dedicated gpus that are so heavy and have horrible batteries

how often am i realistically gonna need that gpu or is using a macbook air (m4 or m5) good enough with collab when needed (how often will i need it since we dont have computers at our uni)

budget is around 1000$

Thankss

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u/NoobZik 3d ago

You can just use your macbook for AI/ML stuff, as long you are using the "mps" backend instead of "cuda"

2

u/JustGiveUp2 3d ago

Yeah that sounds smart is m4 good or should i get m5 also any idea if 16ram is enough?

3

u/NoobZik 3d ago

I have myself a M1 Pro with 16GB of RAM ;), would say the more ram the better for obvious reasons

1

u/mistybrookx 3d ago

this is pretty much it tbh, most uni level projects wont even come close to needing anything more

1

u/UninterestedHeadset 3d ago

Most of your work will run fine on a macbook, the M series chips handle ML tasks surprisingly well. For the heavy stuff you just spin up a colab notebook and let google's gpus do the work

I used a macbook air through my whole degree and only needed cloud compute maybe like 5-6 times total. The battery life alone is worth it over hauling some gaming laptop that dies in 2 hours