For machine learning engineering, and/or gaming, I strongly recommend a Legion Pro. I'm rocking this from 2022 ($1400 at the time). Check gaminglaptop.deals and r/laptopdeals. Outside Legion, see brand quality. Get a cooling pad to improve temps, performance, and protect from dust.
If money's not an issue, ignore everything below and get a 5090 (or the latest and greatest). Instructions below are meant to save money by finding a needs-based sweet-spot.
If you're buying it only for gaming, get as high a GPU as you can afford in the Nvidia 40-series, anything 4070 and above. The 50-series raster gains are marginal (low bang-for-buck). And DLSS4 (the main performance marketing of the 50-series launch) is backwards-compatible to 40. This offers AI upscaling and multi-frame generation, which improve gaming performance significantly. It opens performance improvements to software instead of hardware, so your laptop can continue to improve as Nvidia drivers release. You'll be limited in DLSS capabilities if you buy a 30-series Nvidia; so if you plan to game, get a 4070+. I recommend a 4080. Nvidia is recommended over AMD due to DLSS.
If you're buying the laptop to traing machine learning models and play games, get 4090. With ML, VRAM is more essential than compute, and the top tier of each series (xx90) has the highest VRAM. Nvidia is required - ML frameworks are Nvidia-first, through CUDA and CuDNN.
If you're buying the laptop only for work in ML, you can downgrade to 3090 and save lots of money. Much cheaper than 40/50-series, but in the VRAM sweet-spot at an xx90. Use WSL2 (Ubuntu) if you need Windows; else, use Linux. See mla/12 for details.
For gamers it's obvious. But for ML, while strides are being taken in Apple Silicon, it's still not first-class. If you plan to do heavy ML work, especially training, you're much safer with a PC. If you only need inference (eg running a local LLM via Ollama), a Mac is fantastic.
I'm not seeing Legion Pro sales currently (2025-04-18), they're running $1700+. I'll update here when I do. Some current sales: