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!

  • nizegoOPBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    scientist use day-to-day that doesn’t run natively on apple silicon now.

    Thanks for sharing your perspectives! One thing which makes me listen to the “fearmongering” of ARM, is this specific issue which has been open for long: https://github.com/DLR-RM/stable-baselines3/issues/914

    That is only an example, but that is the library (in addition to LLMs) I use now :)