So I’m gonna be using it for pretty heavy programming. I am into ML also and it would be possible to do that on Dell cause of very powerful rtx 4050 GPU.
However i am a student and a good battery life is also important according with portability and mac wins on both.
But also mac is being so cringe with memoty and base model with 8 gb is for 1600 and I’d have to get it for 1800 if i want 16. (Im gonna go for 16 if i get it)
While with current black friday sale i can get dell for 1450 with 16 gigs and maybe even 1550 if i want 32?!?
So what laptop do y’all reckon is best for me. Note im not very concerned with gaming and have my Alienware anyways which I’m not being able to sell since I can’t trust fb marketplace buyers 🥲
would also appreciate comments on dells battery life and if someone has run training of ml models on it. If it can last like 10ish hours with decent usage I’d be happy tbh. And also is 0.6 pounds really that heavier thats how much heavier it is than mac
My order of priority is:
Performance, Battery and portability, Price,
It’s strange that nowadays IT students can’t simply choose a laptop. A $500 laptop or a $1500 desktop can be your best solution. Performance exclude portability and battery life. Lower prices mean sacrificing performance. PErsonally, I don’t know of any ‘heavy’ programming required for university students, even in ML—it’s basic af. About battery life, well, most modern laptops can provide over 4 hours of battery life, which should enough. If you’re into ML, you probably should know the necessary software and how it works. Instead of scamming your parents for an expensive laptop, that you don’t actually need for studying, take the time to learn about the software you need and how does it work. Come back later if you still have questions
not for my internship and ml competitions that ive done/ will be going for :) i have had scenarios in which it would have been very useful to have a good gpu such as for training a convnext large model when i have 20 gigs of data or when loading big live financial data into ram which obv can’t be done in an 8 GB ram much less a 500 dollar laptop as you are suggesting. I know its almost always better to use cloud compute which i do like kaggle, colab or AWS sometimes but it is pricey to rent and id really love to do it offline.
bold of you to assume what a student’s workload might look if you have no background on them <3
i asked for deciding between one of the 2 just “chose something cheaper cus you don’t need it” :(
if you have time for things like this posts so there is no load for sure. Chose whatever you like if it runs software you actually need. But keep in mind that most of software on arm macbooks are backported from x86 architecture and still works like shit or even doesn’t exit
so Mac is excluded because there is a lot of paid nesessary goodies you actually probably need to make your life easier