Help me choose between 2 Macbooks

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1

I’m choosing between two computers and need some help deciding: a MacBook Pro M4 with 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, or a MacBook Pro M4 Pro with 24 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage. I’m a data scientist who’s also developing applications and learning to build workflows with LLMs. I’d like to start experimenting with some lightweight models locally. Should I maybe wait and save for an M4 Pro with 48 GB of RAM, or would the 32 GB model be enough?

Thanks!

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This is a very hard question to answer. LLMs are so memory intensive. I think you will have more fun with a M4 Pro with 48 GB. That being said a) if you need to save for it, i’d wait for the M5 Pro udpate. b) For that kind of money, you could get an NVidia RTX 5080 or perhaps even a 5090 laptop around Black Friday. Cuda destroys Apple in AI tasks, and a 5080 gives you 16gb for VRAM and the 5090 gives you 24gb

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Hey,

The fact that you are deciding between macbooks for AI and data science is proof for me that you know about nvidia cuda, but you simply just want a macbook. I’ll make it simple for you-

  1. Get a macbook pro M4 pro 48 GB
  2. Or a Macbook pro M4 32/48 GB
  3. If you can wait and have the budget then go with the M5 macbook pro (they improved the igpu tailored it for AI workloads). Or the M5 Pro macbook Pro with similar Ram.
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