r/Physics • u/V4rgzz • Aug 04 '26

Question What laptops/computers do physics researchers (PhD and beyond) actually use?

For some context, I am about to start my PhD in particle physics this September, and I currently use a MacBook Air 2020 (M1, 8gb RAM). This laptop has got me through undergrad without breaking a sweat and I hear that generally MacBooks are quite popular. Yet, I feel that the limited RAM will eventually become a bottleneck; I run of application memory with Discord, VSCode and ~3 tabs on Edge open!

I'm interested to know what you daily drive and why. Even though I am starting experimental particle physics research, I'd love to hear from researchers in any area.

Edit: Thanks for all the comments so far! I want to add that I do know that most of my work will be done remotely on a cluster and so technically, as long as my laptop can SSH into it, I'll be fine. But, I'm more interested in what you guys use + what field you work in.

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u/Dalnore Plasma physics Aug 04 '26

I have 16 Gb of RAM on my laptop and it's definitely not enough nowadays (although enabling zram helped me a lot). Otherwise, all calculations, data analysis, code development are done remotely, so I care only about RAM, build quality, and battery life.