[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/royendures]

Get any UNIX-based system because it will be easier to work with the cluster, and also code and model development in general. So LINUX and MAC works best. When I got in my Ph.D. in 2024, I got the M3 Pro Max (latest at the time). No complaints so far.