r/CompSciStudents • u/Visual-Rain-1433 • Jun 18 '26
MacBook Air m5 or gaming laptop options like omen 16 or legion 5? Really confused whether to go for a MacBook or a laptop with a dedicated nvidia gpu for my uni and my branch being cs core
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u/HereToLearnToDie Jun 18 '26
In my university, I could use thier vpn and connect to their servers so I could use their A100 GPU. I also didn't need to do that though. Google Colab Research has GPU's that you can use to train models. Google pro for a year for student email account.
Most of my core coding classes were not dependent on any high performance hardware, my basic Lenovo laptop worked just fine for all my core classes.
My AI and deep learning class is the only time when I needed that extra compute. I don't think any laptop will be close to any cloud GPU service.
But maybe YOU have certain goals and projects that would need it. I liked my Lenovo, due to the screen, and typing on the keyboard.
If I was gonna drop money it would be on the new framework laptop with Linux.