Depends what you're doing and how long you want to wait.

TBH, I have a workstation hp laptop at work that plugs into a dock and goes to two other monitors + laptop monitor. Its i5, don't know ram, probably low, assuming ssd hard drive Unknown cost, was giving by company. Open tabs in firefox and the thing stutters, and slows down.

At home I've got a gaming laptop with i7 3.1mhz' M2 pro hd, 16g ram '17, 1050 4gig. $1000 open box over a year ago g = gaming laptop c = company laptop

Bootup, g = 10 seconds or less C = around 1.5 - 2 mins. Running basic stuff, almost the same time, instantaneous, Running, large data sets with pandas, matplot lab g = almost instantaneous to few seconds, c = I had it take 5-10 minutes for basic formatting of data sets, combine several data sets, were talking 15 minutes Multiple tabs, games running, ect g = no issues, c = stutters sound, slows down, issues, Large files = g = no problem, c = memory errors Machine learning stuff = g = extremely hard to do stuff - hours , c = never? Excel longer than 15 rows= g = no issues c= locks up, crashes and slows down computer

I guess where I'm going with this, if you plan to do data heavy stuff, the cheaper computer can do it , but takes time, if you're doing machine learning and intense analyiss , many open tabs in firefox, with programs running. The cheap one might not even be able to do it.

To just learn code, tbh, you can get away with a cheap computer, intense stuff I'd go with something more expensive if you can afford it.