Best size laptop for engineering major

J1772protocol
Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:54:26 +0000

It depends on what you’re studying though. For one, I’m getting a bit tired of having a stationary desktop (though I like how upgradeable it is). I’m not sure how much I’ll be in the dorm room anyway. Second, I don’t know how far I’ll be from home - several of the colleges I’m looking at are closer than 100mi away (San Jose and Davis, for example), but some are around 500-600 miles away or more (like Oregon State).

Also, I have an 11" 1366x768 netbook (Thinkpad x120e) as a secondary machine right now, and while I’m planning to keep it, the screen res drives me up the wall if I want to do too much on it. I’d much rather carry around a 13" laptop - not much heavier if any, and the screen size increase is nice. I like Thinkpads (along with their upgradeability and build quality), and don’t care about the shiny factor. I’m looking into Macs because I prefer OS X’s interface in some ways, and because I’m not a fan of the Windows 8.x design.

I’m not exactly what kind of system would be good for the programs I’ll need to run in EE.

I’ll probably get a Nexus 7 at some point - I skipped out on the current generation for now (not sure if I want to buy something now that’ll really be used a year from now if it’ll become outdated quickly). I’m not sure how good that would be for notes though, and most tablets don’t have wacom digitizers or the like (I’ve tried capacitive styluses - those don’t work well).