My issue is that I need to upgrade my personal laptop. I currently have a refurbished 2020(1?) MacBook Air Intel chip and it provides about 8GB of Ram. That was all I needed when I was just coding. Now that I’m in security and love setting up multiple VMs, I realized I need a lot more horsepower. Also it overheats very quickly with just one chrome browser tab running to the point where I just use my work laptop (M2 Pro).

I saw there was the new M3 Pro and I think one of the models provides 18GB Unified memory but I think I need something like 32GB RAM bare minimum.

I want to be able to set up security onion for instance and have the ability to set up pentesting labs where I have multiple machines running at once. So that’s where non-MacBooks catch my idea but I don’t know which one to get?

Any suggestions? My budget is <= $2500-3k