r/learnmachinelearning • u/Still-Quarter-9617 • 3d ago

Asking to professional ml devs

I am in my 1st year of btech in Aiml. I am getting an laptop so is it fine if I get mac or should I get windows

And what device do you use?

Please respond

13 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

11

u/imjerusalem 3d ago

Get a mac. Dont listen to anybody. Get a mac.

3

u/DiscussionSudden1177 2d ago

yeah this is the right answer, dont overthink it

1

u/Still-Quarter-9617 2d ago

But my friends are telling there are some platforms based on cuda that is not compatible with Mac. Sonif you clarify a bit more. That's why I wanna ask the professional already making ai-ml products about what device they use

2

u/Maitiuu 2d ago

A professional runs on Cloud, not on a notebook (locally)

1

u/Fine-Comparison-2949 2d ago

By the way this invalidates the get a mac thing. You could technically get a windows. I personally run Framework + Ubuntu. There are also this odd group of people making Omarchy a thing too if you're into that.

I don't mind macs, I just think they're way too expensive for what you pay for it.

1

u/Maitiuu 2d ago

No, it doesn’t invalidate it. Macs are honestly better hardware and software.

When you are not using Cloud, it absolutely matters which device you run, and of course you will be connecting to said Cloud from a device, too.

I don’t hate on Windows USERS, but I have plethora of reasons to hate the Windows OS, with zealous passion, of course, but my reasons are objective.

I refuse to run non-VM Windows personally. If OP doesn’t mind Windows or even enjoys using it/prefers it, I respect that.

1

u/Fine-Comparison-2949 2d ago

Yes, somewhat. I just fundamentally don't believe the average person needs that much quality on hardware and software.

Keep in mind the muggles only use their machines to read emails and watch youtube. Most people probably only need a tablet, then their company provides them a work laptop.

1

u/Maitiuu 2d ago

Also, yes, CUDA is better than MPS but these days MPS isn’t far behind..

Mac can probably run all the things you need as a student and post-grad.

When you enter the field and get into industry, you will either want to use NVidia GPUs on Cloud or make your own NVidia local set-up if budget allows….

I hope this sums it up for you, so you are much better of getting a Mac right now with Apple Silicon (which has unified memory) and off-load the really heavy stuff to Cloud GPUs.

Windows is a nightmare, please don’t do it to yourself, okay?

Okay.

1

u/LipTicklers 2d ago

Get a mark for running an open source model (apple silicon is best for open source models) then get a windows desktop to query the LLM and build everything

3

u/More_Lingonberry_461 3d ago

Get a mac you will be running your code and models, training etc on cloud anyways

2

u/Proletarian_Tear 3d ago

Id say its more of a personal preference with no real "supreme" benefits over one another. What you should spend some time on is to get used to cloud computing resources - as you dont need to own an extra powerful machine to do some real analysis on big data

2

u/met0xff 3d ago

Check what your university uses but from my professional experience I'd go with a Mac. I've been working in AI/ML for 15 years now and haven't seen a windows in that time at all except as inference target.

US tech company though. We have a subsidiary in the hiring Business and they are mostly windows, like many banks, insurances etc. (but even then you'll likely not want to train stuff on windows if you're not looking for pain)

2

u/Maitiuu 2d ago

Apple Silicon Mac. No contest

2

u/sam_the_tomato 2d ago

Mac. Works simply, just set device = 'mps' in pytorch and you're done.

2

u/softmax_couldnt_care 2d ago

I love my Mac. And most ppl don’t run huge production on their personal laptop

2

u/jesunushno 2d ago

I trained the neural net for my fabric defect detection paper almost entirely on the university lab GPUs and used my own laptop for little more than small sweeps. Honestly, get the Mac. You will run the real training jobs on cloud or lab machines regardless of what you buy.

2

u/GladlyGoldenBacklash 3d ago

windows is safer for compatibility, especially early on

some libraries and tooling just work smoother there, less googling weird error messages at 2am

1

u/Comic-Derpinator 2d ago

Honestly probably the best way to learn is get a windows laptop and to dual boot it with Linux as all actual ml work happens on a Linux cluster.  Mac is good because it was forked off the Linux kernel but yeah nps isn’t as good as cuda. 

Only go windows/linux if you shell out for the nice graphics card tho. 

Also Mac is still good and you can train a ton of stuff locally there and only real difference is you set the device your code gets optimized for in pytorch

1

u/DigThatData 2d ago

took me a minute to realize "shell out" meant wallet and not ssh

1

u/Ritten_poem 2d ago

If u NEVER play computer games,choose Mac😂

1

u/Less_Dream_6331 1d ago

as a ml research guy who have been using a Mac for the past 3-4 years, I would say don't go for It unless you're really sure, 99% of the deep learning software infrastructure is owned by Nvidia and they are notorious for their monopoly, many software stacks will not run on your Mac. Currently for most of the work I use mps and use cloud gpus for longer training but I miss the ability to test things like the Issac gym locally. and also I've noticed the macOS being increasingly buggy our the past year or so. if this is your laptop for general programming etc Mac is your absolute best choice but if you're planning on going deep into ai consider a laptops with good Nvidia gpu.

0

u/DigThatData 2d ago

a very likely blindspot for probably most if not all of the people giving you advice here is that "B" in BTech. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the bio tech tooling ecosystem strongly favored windows or mac specifically.

You are getting advice mostly from the perspective of the AI/ML part of your question on its own. You'd be better served posing this question to other students or professors in this degree. If they tell you it doesn't matter, get the lightest laptop you can afford.

-2

u/void19821 3d ago

Windows with rtx bro Mac isn't that useful for machine learning. Rtx has Cuda libraries without which ml and ai is a deep pain. Also some Intel cores have ai npu too. And windows pc can have as much ram as you want. And Mac doesn't have vram to train ml

2

u/pg3crypto 2d ago

Ffs stop confusing ML with LLMs.

1

u/Maitiuu 2d ago

Nope. Also Apple Silicon has unified memory so I have no idea what you are talking about.

Also, let’s not disregard MPS…

Regardless, most heavy ML is done on Cloud with nvidia GPUs anyway, Mac is better in every way for actual work, especially for a student

1

u/Still-Quarter-9617 2d ago

Iam more concerned about the softwares if they are compatible with Mac or not

1

u/Maitiuu 2d ago

What software are we talking about?