My current PC laptop is soon ready to retire, having worked for seven years. As a replacement I’m considering the new Macbook Pros. It is mainly the battery time which makes me consider Apple. These are my requirements for the laptop:

  • great battery time
  • 16" since I’m old and my eyes are degraded
  • dual external monitors
  • software engineering including running some local docker images

Then I have two ML requirements which I don’t know if I could fulfill using a laptop:

  • good performance for working with local LLMs (30B and maybe larger)
  • good performance for ML stuff like Pytorch, stable baselines and sklearn

In order to fulfill the MUST items I think the following variant would meet the requirements:

Apple M3 Pro chip with 12‑core CPU, 18‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine
36 GB memory
512 GB SSD
Price: $2899

Question: Do you think I could fulfill the ML requirements using a Macbook Pro M3? Which config would be smart to buy in such case?

Thankful for advice!