So I'm quite conflicted as of now. I've been looking into it for 2 weeks but still can't decide. Then I remembered that I'm part of a 36,000 member community with experts everywhere, so why not ask here. Here's the "context.md": I am a university student but I also love experimenting and working with open source frameworks, LLM's and so on. So a lot of the parts I value is: Portability - A laptop let's me easily go anywhere with all my work, projects, anything and everything. An issue though, because they are laptops, that means it can't handle as much power (watts) coming in = less performance. This again could be a very minor issue, don't have experience with MacBook's but everyone running portable AI friendly local hardware always has a MacBook. - Yet another caveat, it's still possible to have a whole home desktop and connect with it over the internet, but there's always a slight delay and it might not feel that smooth ruining the "flow state" or whatever, not too sure about this as I haven't tested anything other than https://remotly.com for very light usage. Performance - The most important thing is performance of course, I want to run 9B, maybe even Gemma 4 26B on top of tons of locally running systems like my own OS, Hermes, cron jobs and so much more. The overall aspect - Things such as "If I get a laptop, will it sound like an airplane", "Is the plastic good enough to sustain 4-5 years of constant moving in a bag, floors (in a bag) and so on?", "Is the battery life good enough to hold out if I am out the entire day (considering I don't use 100% of the ram of course)", "Cuda would definitely be good, most of the open source LLM stuff is easily supported by Cuda, aka RTX's", "Can 32GB's of DDR5 RAM hold out better than a 16 GB RTX 6 GB VRAM laptop, and is it even worth getting a RTX x on a laptop? Instantly butchering the capabilities?". Now the budget aspect Over the last few weeks I've had come to a few conclusions:

I spent this week doing something I don't see talked about much in the vibe-coding world. Instead of just shipping my site, I tried to break it. I built it careful. Rate limiter, guards, the usual. But reading your own code never catches anything, you wrote it, you're blind to it. So I pointed an AI at it and told it to act like an attacker. It got in in about 40 seconds, through a header I forgot you could fake. Then it found two more holes on the poll, same root cause: a security switch flipped on, but the rule behind it let everyone through. Dashboard said protected. It wasn't. Fixed it the same day, then ran the attack again live on the patched version to check the work. What's stuck with me since: this whole space is optimized for building fast. Almost nobody talks about building it so it lasts, or so it doesn't quietly leak everyone's data because you never thought to ask it not to. That maintainable, secure side is the part I actually care about, and it feels underserved. So I'm curious what you all are seeing out there. Is there real appetite forming for the "build it right, not just fast" angle? Or is the market still mostly heads-down on speed and model comparisons? Trying to read whether this is a lane worth going deeper on. Video where I walk through the whole thing: https://youtu.be/mdQ8xiKWTc0