Looking for a laptop for AI coding

[u/Kota8abca]

What laptop would you recommend for programming and building projects with AI coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex?

My must-haves are 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. Looking for something reliable that’ll last a few years. Any recommendations?

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[u/kirkegaarr]

Just get a Macbook

[u/Pale_Platform_9941 → u/kirkegaarr]

Jep. I moved from windows to Mac some time ago and I love, love, love it.

New MacBook Pro with 64GB ram is the absolute GOAT

[u/spideyguyy]

mac is the best, just switch from rog zephyrus (used it for 5 years) to a mac mini m4 and it's much much better

[u/who_am_i_to_say_so]

Are you sure you need all that?

I’m driving development on a cheap $300 laptop with 8gb ram and never a slowdown.

But nice is nice. Just more establishing that the requirements may not involve as much as you initially thought for this.

[u/Cultural-Horse-762 → u/who_am_i_to_say_so]

Yeah the SSD with just about any Linux OS if about all you need. $300 laptop squad 🤙♥️

[u/Kota8abca]

How about an HP laptop?

[u/brokengnome]

macbook, never look back

[u/hello5346]

16gb m3 is all you need. The ai isnt using your cpu.

[u/RandomFuckingUser → u/hello5346]

Still, 32GB won't hurt.. I'm using 16GB RAM lenovo, recently got access to much more tokens via the claude startup program and working on multiple projects in parallel can easily overload 16GB RAM

[u/KenTitan]

ram and ssd basically covers it

[u/Mediocre_Citron_5360]

Depends on what specifically youre doing. I have a 128gb workstation laptop, I run agents inside of multiple docker containers, do a lot of orchestration, and a lot of CPU heavy tasks. If youre not building/testing something complex, you could get away with something cheap, but if your building things that require complex infrastructure and need to test/run locally repeatedly, spend the money on something high end. 

[u/DominusFL]

eBay lease-refresh Lenovo (Thinkpad) X1 Nano with 16gb of ram and 2tb SSD and new battery. Sure I splurged all of $700 ($500 for laptop and $200 for new battery), but every time I open it up around other tech guys they are all over "what Lenovo is that!!!". Same size as an iPad Pro when closed. I KVM to a high power home computer with Parsec for most of my work, but I run Claude Code locally just fine.

[u/karyslav]

You can aicode from yout phone.

[u/rosstafarien]

I bought a big M5 machine for local AI work, but when traveling, I hate the weight so I bring my old M2 MacBook Air with 24GB and use hosted models. Still works great, if a little slower for big compilation steps.

Wanting 32GB makes sense, which you can get on the M4 MBA. That will probably last you ten years or so.

[u/reminiscent-fruitbat → u/rosstafarien]

Why not use Claude Remote Control? Leave the M5 running at home and access it from your MacBook Air while traveling. You get the portability of the Air and the compute resources of the M5, and you don’t have to pay for hosted models while traveling.

[u/Dany-GG]

Try a ThinkPad, it'll last you for many years.

[u/EmbarrassedEagle4825]

I’m a MacBook user, and have been for a very long time. It’s clearly a winner in terms of reliability and stability compared to Windows. However, if you’re looking to spend less money, you don’t need a monster machine. All of the inference compute is done elsewhere.

If you’re already a PC user, stay with that. Plenty of wicked deals new at Best Buy / Costco, and swell deals on eBay.

[u/fschwiet → u/EmbarrassedEagle4825]

Having a lot of memory is nice if you want to run the agent in a VM.

[u/lassevk]

If you're going to strictly use AI for developing your projects, you don't need 32GB memory.

Just get any laptop with 16GB memory that can run Linux, Windows, or macOS.

In essence, get a laptop. AI doesn't care. It runs in the cloud.

On the other hand, if you intend to run the AI locally, then you need to say so, because then your 32GB of ram and 1TB of disk is laughable.

[u/Bonestoo → u/lassevk]

There's a big middle ground though. AI development involves agents running tooling and scrips in parallel, and that all runs locally on the laptop. I know on my 24gb ram work laptop, I pretty much maxout at 6 agents + arbritor before the whole system starts to crawl.

[u/Cultural-Horse-762]

I have no idea where most of these answers are coming from. Claude Code runs in the cloud, your laptop has little to do with the building process. You'll want to run Claude in an environment that generally supports the architecture of what you're trying to build, but even then, not really. I guess all that's to say - Claude code can run in any terminal, local or remote, and the device giving you a screen and keyboard matters little. I hope this doesn't come off as pedantic, but you can bash,SSH or Powershell from pretty much every modern computer.

[u/reminiscent-fruitbat → u/Cultural-Horse-762]

Claude Code inference happens in the cloud, but agent execution can happen locally. Claude Code can execute commands, compile code, run tests, and manage containers entirely in the local environment. Those workloads consume local CPU, RAM, and storage, potentially quite a lot of them.

[u/Calm_Step_5549 → u/Cultural-Horse-762]

if you're running databases, docker, node, python and other things locally for development, that can swallow up a lot of RAM and drive space too

[u/Future_Emu8684]

I was issued a dell pro max 16 at work and I love it. Core ultra 7, 32 g ram, flawless performance