College frosh daughter (Chem E major) used a Mac Book Pro all through middle school/high school but unit is now approaching end of useful life.
Considering moving her to Surface (either 4 or Book)…it would be an OS change, but not insurmountable now that the OS are more and more similar (than they were in my day, at least).
One caveat is that I am currently the IT “department” for our family and I know Mac OS as well as iOS very well. PC/Windows, not so much. I am 100% fine in her working with her school’s IT pros to trouble shoot things going forward, though.
Would love to hear from anyone who moved from a Mac unit to a Surface unit for either school or work.
There will be inevitably be hiccups with a change of OS - different interface, different errors when they pop up. If you (or your friendly family IT member) is comfortable with things on a Mac, you’ll be able to understand whatever results come up on a Google search, and that 80% of your IT work. I’ve been a Linux user since getting my first computer in high school (now 7 years ago), but I can figure out the ins and outs of Windows or Mac when necessary.
What advantage does the Surface offer that the Macbook doesn’t? If you comfortable with something stick with it. I can’t think of any circumstance when you would need a touchscreen. You may actually save money with a new Macbook over the Surface Book.
I used to say the same thing about touchscreens. (And for a normal laptop, I still think they’re silly.) But when I take notes now, it’s mostly by annotating directly on powerpoints on my tablet. The Surface has a digitizer, too, so you can actually write much better than with the capacitive screens typically found on tablets/laptops. If the Surface hardware worked with Linux, I’d be tempted.
I was the same way with touchscreens as well but I love the touchscreen. Makes browsing the web so much easier specially if you don’t have a mouse. Me personally I would choose between a MacBook pro which is $1,199 even with the education discount though you can get it for $1,149.99 and a coupon for $50 off at bestbuy.* You can also get $100 off the Surface pro 3 i3 model or the i5 model and I think the i7 model of the SP4. I got the i5 base model with 4GB of RAM and 128GB SSD which runs at the MSRP of $999 but I got it $100 off. Buying the “optional” type cover and a sleeve it came out to $1,150 for me including sales tax for NYC which is basically 9%. The MacBook Pro with retina display 13 inch would cost me $1,197 and change including sales tax.
That being said I thought going with a MacBook myself because while I am a windows guy myself I have an iPhone and iMessage on the MacBook and everything else that comes with it sounds cool. Still have a bit to decide and return my surface pro 4 but I am thinking of keeping it. For me I find OS X based off my half hour messing around with it at a BestBuy store to be quite easy to use. I would assume messing around with Windows will yield similar results if you just mess around with any device at a tech store.