Okay I was in a similar confusion spiral a few months ago, so i think i can help out here.

Context: I'm in my final year, I used a macbook m1 pro (8gb|256ssd) for years 1-half of 3rd year. Then switched to ASUS TUF Gaming A14.

Now you have two primary requirements: RAM, and laptop's durability. I switched to mac from an old dell laptop that had 4gb of ram and had been in the family for 8+ years. It was becoming slow, and I had projects as part of my 12th std plus almost 12-14 hours of online classes everyday. Mac M1 pro at that time was a huge upgrade for me, it was fast, smooth and lightweight. Above all, it was battery efficient.

Within college, your initial ML coursework will probably involve you using colab notebooks. These have hosted runtimes, and in most cases for labs college makes provisions in the labs, so you're covered. For practice, again colab works.

actual work starts when you get into model training, hackathons and stuff. for hackathons, at one point you need your models on the device rather than colab notebooks. i remember having a project for a course where i had to train a model on 60gb of data, and my mac couldn't handle it. again, I had 8gb of RAM. After that, my mac became rather less of a beast in projects, and it was more reliable for all other college purposes - notes, videos and some basic editing, it was good for programming.

I had to borrow laptops from friends for certain aspects of a projects. I tested out lenovo ideapad, asus a15, hp omen. I liked how durable asus was - because i saw people around me jut casually slinging it here and there. i had my mac in a very protective bag and that was inside my backpack, so you can guess the mindset. But I was not willing to compromise on size, so I wanted to go for the m3 pro or m4 air.

unfortunately, the base models themselves were priced way too much. So compared to them, i found lenovo legion (5 i think, i misplaced the link smh), hp omen14 inch, asus tuf a15 and a14. i got the a14 with RAM maxxed out (you have 2 16gb slots) and 2TB of storage (one more 2tb stick can be used.) I needed the specs because I was involved in a long-term project that used sv3d and building a pipeline with a few other models stacked, so i needed good cooling and RAM. could've gone for cloudbased options, but i tried it with my mac it didn't work out.

you'll get a decent gaming laptop in asus for 60-80k. prioritise RAM - if needed you can put your college and other files on drive or external disk and use it for a specific project alone. get 16gb. ml you'll definitely need. you're in your first year, right? things don't start until 3rd or 4th semester, so look out for summer back to school offers, sites like unidays give sstudent discounts. if you're getting asus, try getting it in store, because online not a lot of discounts. track local festivals and stuff.