My issue is that I need to upgrade my personal laptop. I currently have a refurbished 2020(1?) MacBook Air Intel chip and it provides about 8GB of Ram. That was all I needed when I was just coding. Now that I’m in security and love setting up multiple VMs, I realized I need a lot more horsepower. Also it overheats very quickly with just one chrome browser tab running to the point where I just use my work laptop (M2 Pro).
I saw there was the new M3 Pro and I think one of the models provides 18GB Unified memory but I think I need something like 32GB RAM bare minimum.
I want to be able to set up security onion for instance and have the ability to set up pentesting labs where I have multiple machines running at once. So that’s where non-MacBooks catch my idea but I don’t know which one to get?
Any suggestions? My budget is <= $2500-3k
I think you first need to decide if you actually need a laptop, or if you want a desktop, or a workstation, or something else such as a rack server. Obviously, a desktop form-factor PC is easiest to build, but you wont get the new Apple M3 etc. to go with it.
You really need to first decide just how much memory and storage you want to accomodate, and then what form-factor you want it in.