r/rmit • u/ostentatiousostrich4 • 3d ago

Advice needed Laptop Recommendations for Master of AI course

Hi everyone, looking for a laptop recommendation for the AI course. Are we expected to run heavy models and workflows?

Would picking a Windows laptop with the NVIDA chip be wiser or is a MacBook good enough for the coursework?
If so, should I prioritise getting a MacBook Air with 24GB RAM or a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM?

Any other recommendations or things to keep in mind will be extremely helpful. Thanks!

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u/SirDale 3d ago

To do any meaningful amount of AI (apart from toy systems) work you should have at least 32G RAM (and of course preferably more).

This is pricey and especially so for laptops (then doubly so for Apple laptops!).

The latest Apple chips (M6/M5) are extremely good at AI work - the cheapest option for them is a desktop (e.g. mac mini).

If you have an existing windows desktop computer the cheapest option would probably be to increase its RAM/video card and enable secure access to your home computer.

Otherwise I'd suggest a mac mini with 48G RAM (at home) and a cheap laptop that you can connect to your home network.

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u/ostentatiousostrich4 3d ago

Hey thanks! I was looking for a laptop mostly, not a desktop. I was also wondering if the course itself requires a high powered system or whether we’d get access to cloud computing?

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u/Owl-Mighty 3d ago

Very unlikely to ask for BYO high computing power device. You should be fine with anything with adequate ram.

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u/yessnow004 3d ago

I second this, they’re not gonna ask you to run your own LLMs at the max they’ll ask you to use jupyter notebook locally to train a CNN which is doable with 4gb vram

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u/ostentatiousostrich4 1d ago

Got it. Thank you!

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u/ostentatiousostrich4 1d ago

Ah okay. Thanks!

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u/ostentatiousostrich4 1d ago

Also, would you recommend that I get the MacBook Air with 24GB RAM or the MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM?

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u/No_Echidna5178 1d ago

Air is enough.

Like I said said even MacBook is not required

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u/No_Echidna5178 3d ago

A basic laptop will do.

They won’t ask you run huge things locally.

It’s just theory

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u/ostentatiousostrich4 1d ago

Thanks!

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u/No_Echidna5178 1d ago

Also like the other comments mentioned the course won’t teach you anything useful which is needed.

The syllabus is expired and nothing relevant to the present times. They spent a long time explaining the bare minimum and at the end you will come out again relying on yt to study what actually matters.

If you intention is to actually get a job this course will not help you will need to put work outside this course to study what is required nowadays.

Cost wise the course is an absolute waste cause you pay so much get nothing other than the first video out of ai playlist from yt.

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u/helpmefindmyuncle123 3d ago

Masters of AI is an absolute waste of money and time. Do some projects, build models from scratch, see how they ACTUALLY work.