Best Laptops for Data Science (ML & AI)

Whether you're a Data Science student or a veteran AI & ML wizard, these laptops offer you ample portability, high-resolution displays, comfortable keyboards, and a variety of specs to meet your specific needs. Here are the main aspects we took into consideration when choosing these laptops:

Display: Unless you are using an external monitor frequently, you will want a display that is 15 inches or larger. You will also want to make sure the screen brightness is at least 400nits, but preferably 500. Lastly, for resolution we'd recommend >220 pixels per inch for small text clarity.

Chassis: We'd love to see you get a laptop less than 4 pounds, but under 5 would be the maximum we'd recommend unless you are getting dedicated graphics. That will increase your weight substantially.

Keyboard: This is subjective to some extent, but we recommend looking for a satisfying click and a standard layout at the very least. If you're a fan of numpads, you may want to double check that a laptop has one before buying. They can make your keyboard off center which is something to look out for.

Trackpad: Haptic ones are the nicest, but you'll mostly just need it to be nice and accurate for quickly navigating into data cells.

Battery Life: New processors like AMD Zen 5, Lunar Lake, Apple's M series, and Snapdragon X all offer solid battery life improvements over prior generations. So, if you find yourself working in coffee shops often, we'd recommend picking one of those over a prior year's CPU.

Specs: These can vary depending on whether you are doing your work locally on your laptop or on a remote server. 

- If you mostly use cloud data, your processing power and RAM needs may be quite minimal, but we'd still recommend at least 16GB memory and 512GB of storage at a minimum. Ideally, you'd want 32GB memory and 1TB if you can get it.

- If you are running models on your laptop to save on server time, you will likely want an Nvidia GPU as those are the industry standard due to their CUDA API. Get one with ample graphics memory, and make sure your system memory is at least 32GB, but ideally 64GB. An alternative option for you is the MacBook Pro with their Max chips as they offer a large amount of unified memory.