<p>Laptops only have “enough power” for students who require high performance systems if they are also</p>
<ol>
<li>Big, bulky, heavy</li>
<li>Very, very, very expensive</li>
</ol>
<p>If all you do is dick around on facebook and write papers a laptop is fine, but that’s not what every major requires you to use a computer for. $500 desktop can have roughly 2.5x the performance that a $1000 laptop has when you build it yourself. This means you could potentially buy a laptop and a desktop for the same budget and have the high performance when you need it and a laptop to work around campus on less demanding tasks.</p>