[Synthx]

I have a 2020 Macbook Pro 13 inch with 256GB Storage and 8GB Memory that does great! Well, whenever I actually have time to even dabble in pen testing..

[Dismas]

I'd recommend Asus, Acer, or Lenovo. There's people still using ThinkPads from 20 years ago. Unless you're trying to crack hashes, you don't need much.

[d4ggm4sk]

i have buyd an MSI GE 76 Raider in the Limited Dragon Tiamat Edition, that Laptop rocks!

It's what you do with it that really matters. You can have  $5k USD rig and if all you do is game and practice SQLi then you're wasting your money and time and resources on virtually nothing. To look and sound cool. But you have no idea what you're doing, then you should learn new things with it. You can use a decent laptop to get your labs setup for a CCNA course, like I did, instead of just gaming (I still game though). Start somewhere and dedicate yourself to learning something new every day. I'll also note that you don't need to spend so much on a laptop to practice what you're interested in. You can just as easily learn programming and coding with a cheap Lenovo laptop as you can with a desktop worth 4x as much. It's not about what you have, it's about what you do with your resources at your disposal.

wrong. if you have a very cheap laptop, its going to crash and go black screen if you pen test or do bruteforce.

[slothic]

Ram:

The more the better however I'd recommend 16gb or more.
Dual Channel can help increase cpu performance.
More Ram allows you to allocate more to a virtual machine.

GRAPHIC CARD:
Acutally not too useful as if you're pentesting you're not gonna be spending time cracking hashes if you are just get a vps with a gpu. However it does help with loading sites etc.

STORAGE:
Personal Preference, the more space you have the more you can allocate to vms.

OS:
Doesn't matter. Windows can be used or linux. Either way you can run kali in a vm.

PROCESSOR:
Any processor with more than 4 cores as to allocate cores to vms and multitasking.

HDD OR SSD:
No longer the cavemen times just get an SSD. Any size.

If you do wanna run linux as ur main os get one from dell, lenovo or asus as they usually are widely supported by most distros. Unless you wanna use proprietary drivers then feel free to choose any laptop brand.