51-70k Need suggestions for a laptop for AI/ML stuff

[Rajat Kokane]

The budget is 60-70k. No other activities like gaming will be done on it as it will be used for practicing AI/ML, strictly professional. Needs to have a good battery life too.
Will a gaming laptop appropriate for this? I'm asking because they will have bad battery life. Also, how is MacBook Air M1 for this purpose?

 

[Pyception]

From a developer perspective, MacBook M1 is great. You can't achieve true AI/ML stuff on any laptop, AI/ML required huge GPU power. For example a 3080 with 10GB vram run over 1 hour on 50k data points with a simple randomForest or SVM. My advice would be to purchase a cloud solution (AWS, Azure) to run VM and shut it down once done.

 

[kuzuri]

Almost all laptops that are more performance oriented will had bad battery life compared to say an m1 air or an ultrabook. If you're looking for a pure workhorse of a machine with a gpu, i feel battery life should not be a top priority

 

[gourav]

Almost all laptops that are more performance oriented will had bad battery life compared to say an m1 air or an ultrabook. If you're looking for a pure workhorse of a machine with a gpu, i feel battery life should not be a top priority

Totally agree with this. Wanting performance and battery life is contradictory and you leave yourself with very little choice. Achieving high performance requires the machine to consume more power.

 

[hashedout]

You can go for Macbook M1 air. With all the CC discounts it'll be almost in your budget and you can do AI/ML stuff. Actually, it is the only laptop that has good battery life and can do AI ML stuff.

 

[idestinytechlab]

Always go for M1 or M2 if possible. AI/ML will be much more faster on this machines due to more cores in GPU. These machines are made for that.