Hi Lee. thanks for the question.

For laptop, minimumly you will be needing a laptop with CPU i5, 256GB SSD (HDD works too but very slow), 8GB RAM and 1050ti graphic card.

GPU is better for certain model like neural network and deep learning, you can use Google Colab or other Google AI Platform Notebook as an alternative.

Google AI Platform Notebook is more stable than Google Colab but you need to sign up with visa/master card, previously it was free for 3 months. You may refer to my article on how to register it [https://kahemchu.medium.com/gcp-ai-platform-notebook-bring-your-jupyter-notebook-to-the-cloud-in-5-steps-138e7f7b4eb9]

So I wont say GPU is a must, but more like a good to have for better experience during your studies. Using cloud service will create more task for you like uploading and downloading file, or larger model may not even able to complete running if you using Google Colab.

If your budget is not so tight, you can get i7, 16GB and 1650ti laptop which I currently using or any higher laptop configuration. This spec can cope with most of the task. If you like MacBook, you may need to check out whats are the software your class will be using, else you may have a little trouble. Macbook is definitely able to run Machine learning if you have 8GB RAM or above, again 16GB RAM is recommended.

Last but not least, if you are going back to school for the classes, you may need to have a laptop that have battery life last longer than 4 hours, else you only can stare at your laptop black screen when lecturer is teaching hands-on (my personal experience🤣).

Hope my answer help!

Thanks for reading and have a nice day.