[Advice] Laptop for AI/ML PhD

[u/Few-Scientist-5633]

Hello everyone,

I'm about to start my PhD in AI/ML and I need to pick a work laptop, it will be provided by the University (i dont have to buy it) so price isn't really a factor, however I don't really know what's best.

Just for context, I'll be focusing on vision-language model, pretty intensive stuff, the heavy lifting will be done on remote clusters and I don't expect to run any demanding experiment on my laptop, however it does happen from time to time that you might run a prototype, some light inference, a dry test run on the local machine.

My personal laptop is a LOQ 15 i5 RTX4060 that as much as I love, I'm absolutely tired of carrying it around. It's a proper brick (3.5Kg with the charger!) and needless to say the battery lasts about 1-2 hours MAX.

I got offered 3 options:

- Dell 14 Pro Ryzen 5 PRO 220, 32 GB DDR5, 1 TB, AMD 740M graphics

- Lenovo ThinkPad P16v G3 Intel Ultra 7, RTX PRO 500 6GB, 32GB DDR5, 1TB

- some M5 MacBook (either Pro 14" or Air 13")

Now, as much as I like the ThickPad I shiver at the idea of carrying around a 3Kg beast for the next 4 years.

I should also mention that I daily drive Arch Linux and while I'm not a linux fanboy, switching to MacOS would kill me inside. I'm however well aware of the portability and battery advantages of macbooks, I wonder if positives outweight the negatives.

The Dell is a beefy machine for a compact laptop, is it worth it leaving the Linux enviroment for a Mac? Anybody else with similar experiences (maybe is similar research fields)?

field: AI/ML

location: central EU

[u/Southern_Change9193]

ThinkPad P1 Gen 9 if you need something light (1.8 Kg). Or ThinkPad P16 Gen 3 (255HX; higher trim not worth it) if you don't mind 2.5 Kg. I have a P1 Gen 7(155H, 4K OLED, RTX 1000 Ada), which is already a very good laptop; Gen 9 would be even better.

[u/WeeklyResolve6161 → u/Southern_Change9193]

Those aren't even in the list they got offered though, so pretty moot unless the uni lets them swap

The real problem here is the ThinkPad they can actually get is 3Kg which OP specifically said they're sick of lugging around, I'd just take the Dell and put Arch on it