I am doing computational physics research so mainly running C and Python code and I would like to have some local testing capabilites for AI/ML as well even tho the gist of the work will be done on clusters.
I will like my 2022 victus 16 gb is hitting the ram limit hard, not to mention the plastic breaking down.
I would like a sturdy laptop than can survive 5-7 years. I have been a lifelong windows user and have WSL. For my gaming needs: it is cs2 or deadlock from time to time but I don’t really care about being able to play deadlock or cs2 that much. I loved playing paradox strategy games but now I mostly play very light games like Devil’s Daggers.
If you would suggest me a higher end macbook pro and not the base m5 I would like similar suggestions for laptops on a similar pricepoint to the macs with at least 32 gb for the windows versions and 14-15 inches. I just feel like you would need to spend a lot more to get better performance when the zephyrus g14 gets warm to the touch according to josh and other reviewers.
I am unsure about the compatibility of most apps on Mac and the expensive ram, but the oled screen on the hp scares me a bit as I don’t want my taskbar or running stuff overnight to burn into the screen.
Which one should I pick if my most demanding work is programming and some gaming on the side? Most of my workflow is having 40 firefox tabs open with thunderbird, zotero, clion, etc.
Okay, so we might have an issue with finding a good option that isn’t expensive and likely overkill; I’ll get to it soon.
First of all, if you actually care about gaming, then I would 100% avoid the MacBook Pro, and any Macs for the matter. The gaming performance compared to even an RTX 4060 or 5050 is not that great, macOS isn’t very good for gaming (especially since Catalina dropped many games and many other developers do not want to port their games to Metal because it is an Apple proprietary toolkit only used by Apple), and at least for the Macs being sold right now, Linux support is non existent and may never be on the level of Windows laptops. Given Rosetta 2 will no longer work starting with macOS 28 (macOS 27, the first version solely for Apple Silicon, will be the last version that has Rosetta 2 in the OS), if you have any apps that might not be updated for Apple Silicon in 2 years or ever, you may want to not consider a Mac if you game and especially if you need proper Linux support. Don’t get me wrong, there are some things a Mac is great at, but gaming, systems programming (apart from Xcode and some web programming), long-term software compatibility, and any real Linux support are not any of those things.
I do need to know a few more things about what you need to do on your proposed laptop, so I have a few questions for you:
What size laptop are you looking for? 14, 15, or 16 inch?
Josh has mentioned that the 2025 Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 does get hot when pushing it, but unfortunately, that’s just par for the course on that size for powerful laptops. So unless you are okay with that and possibly being limited in other ways, like having only 8 GB of vRAM (apart from the upcoming 2026 Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 which will no doubt be very expensive), I would avoid powerful 14 inch laptops and stick to 15 & 16 inch laptops if that was to be my only device.
How much battery life do you need?
Many powerful 16 inch laptops simply will not have good battery life. You’d think this would be better now with advancements in CPU technologies, but of course it isn’t.
How much RAM do you need?
For what you are doing, I wouldn’t go below 32 GB. And if it’s soldered, that might be the limit, such as on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2025.
How much storage do you need?
1 TB should be the minimum for you, although Windows laptops generally can have their SSDs swapped out.
Be aware that if there is only one SSD slot, you’ll either need to reinstall the OS or clone the drive to expand the storage.
What types of AI/ML models are you running locally versus on a cluster?
Some can be very vRAM heavy, and given many laptops are capped at 8 GB of vRAM right now because of Nvidia, this might mean you’ll need to use the cluster a lot more. The only exception to this right now apart from going to an RTX 5070 Ti or higher (which many laptops are not offering right now and the ones that are are super expensive) is AMD Strix Halo, however, those laptops aren’t available apart from super expensive business laptops (like one of the HP ZBook laptops) and the Asus ROG Flow Z13, which is a 2 in 1 tablet, which may not be what you are looking for.
As such, the raw GPU power might not be as important as raw CPU power, but given the vRAM issues, this can be a problem, and this is the biggest problem I was alluding to earlier, given Nvidia tops out with 8 GB on many laptops with a dGPU, even premium ones.
What is your maximum budget?
This might make this decision a lot harder, given RAM and GPU prices right now are going through the roof and then some.
14/15 i want for it not to break my back as i have to carry it for 30 minutes by foot to work with a charger. I don’t care that much about abttery as long as I can stay in a meeting for 1-2 hours on standby give presentation with 20 tabs open on the side and be able to use it without having to plug it in. USB-c charging is a bonus. I could even work with 512 tb if need be. For the AI/ML models it is mostly lightweight models and I have used colab to train the ones I have used before even tho I have access to a cluster so the me the underpowered 5060 of the omen transcend sounds good enoguh just to test stuff locally. I am not sure about how much my university might help me out but I think setting a ceiling around 1.5-6k usd and one around 2k could be good.
Wouldn’t weight be more of a concern than size in that case?
And for coding, a bigger screen size is just inherently more helpful so you can see more of it.
There are a couple of 15+ inch dedicated GPU laptops that’s lighter than a MacBook 16 (2.2kg), for example:
Lenovo Legion 5 & 7 (~1.9kg)
Lenovo Yoga 9 Pro, both 2025 and upcoming 2026 version (2kg)
Lenovo IdeaPad Pro 5, both 2025 & upcoming 2026 version (~1.7kg)
Asus Zephyrus G16 & ProArt P16 (they are 99% identical with each other, and both are also ~1.9kg)
LG Gram Pro 17 (a 17 inch laptop that’s only 1.3kg yet it somehow has a RTX 5050!!!)
Gigabyte Aero X16 (~1.9kg)
But also, since Paradox’s games are way more CPU bound than GPU, you might wanna wait a bit until Panther Lake laptops start showing up next month; their CPU have similar performance to that 255H on the Omen Transcend but with almost half the power consumption (so more power for the GPU!), but it’s iGPU is literally 2x more powerful than the 255H’s iGPU (iirc it’s equivalent to a laptop 3050Ti), and since it’s an iGPU it won’t run out of vRAM
Thank you! Yep, weight w/ charger is far more of a concern then screen size. I will probably wait for the new Intel series to come out + the new Apple laptops as I hope this could decrease prices even further. Also I have played the newer paradox stuff but I mostly love ck2 it is mostly for my work that I prefer to have a good cpu and enough ram to multitask as much as I want.
After much deliberation it seems like the Omen is the fit for me. The Lunar Lake platforms seem to be very expensive. Either that or macbook air m5 24 gb if I tweak a bit during the final decision.
I want to be able to use it for a long time and be able to have it working even if there are supply chain issues.
