Any recommendations for a traditional laptop with i7 and 512GB’s? The Inpirion 7000 from Dell with an NVIDIA GeForce MX250 card seems like a win, but I know nothing and am not sure if $900+ is the way to go. Maybe it is, though.
THANKS!!!
@OneMoreKid Every time I walk over campus I notice that most college students use Macs, I believe their US college market share is 60%+ nowadays. I would look at the new MacBook Pro quad core or the MacBook Air lines.
What will your child study? Are there specific preferences or requirements for that major? For example, my kid is in theater design (lighting). For her field, a Mac is essentially required and the freshman year MacBook model got her through college plus four years of work after graduation. For her MFA, she needed to upgrade to a new MacBook with a lot more memory and a bunch of features I don’t understand but that are essential for her studies.
Not sure where that Apple market share is from. Even a market survey from an Apple business partner, in May, said it was 40%.
No one my D knows, at a top Engineering school, uses a Mac.
Dell is usually a safe bet - it’s what I bought my D 2 years ago entering college. Be sure to get the 4 year, on-site support - it’s paid off for her. You don’t want to be mailing a laptop for service, or dropping it at a local generic computer store, and trying to figure out how to get work done for a week or two on school computers.
Seconding the above vote for the 4 year onsite support. It’s not a question of if services is needed, but when, and it could be the week the paper is due. Great piece of mind for me and we had to use it twice already!
And make sure all work is stored in the cloud as it progresses.
Inspiron has been a great laptop for D and me. There are a lot of permutations, though. If this is for a college kid, consider weight and battery life. I don’t have the impression that the inspiron line is focused too hard on battery life — but the laptops with really good battery life are often more money. The inspiron 7000 series has a metal case that weighs more than the 5000 series; touch screens also weigh more. And don’t even consider a laptop (or really any computer) that doesn’t have a solid state drive. Also what will the laptop be used for? An i7 also uses more power than an i5.
If your going into engineering, don’t get a MacBook, since you can’t run a lot of the programs natively on a Mac. For other fields, more students might be using a Mac, but that doesn’t necessarily make them better (or worse; they’re great computers if that’s what you want, but they’re also ~$1500 with those specifications).
If your student will be using it for gaming, that’s different too.
I’ve heard good things about Dell, and HP also has some good models (Envy 13t for a traditional laptop and Spectre x360 for a 2-in-1 have good reviews so far, and they’d be ~$1000 with those configurations).
Regardless of brand, look for a student discount. For some reason, Costco also has good deals on computers, although I’m not a member so I didn’t buy from there.
A Macbook pro is fine for engineering. You just need to run Parallels, VMWare or Bootcamp. Also make sure to get 16Gb RAM (or more). Macs tend to last longer ; my son still uses a 2012 Macbook pro and he is a senior in ChemE.
I shouldn’t say this as a big Apple shareholder, but if you’re going to need Bootcamp or the like for a Macbook Pro, you should just stick with a pure Windows laptop. Technology improvements dictates that you should upgrade every 3 or 4 years anyways.
Agree with @ProfessorPlum168 to avoid using a virtual machine on the Mac. The Macbook Pro is a great laptop and service/maintenance is arguably better than most other laptops. The non-Mac laptops already mentioned are all good options. I’ll throw in the Lenovo Carbon laptops as a potential fit. My son (in CS) uses a non-Mac laptop with dual boot (Windows 10 and Linux).
Thanks all. Ended up going for last week’s Black Friday sale at Dell with a 15" XPS. Not that I really know what I’m talking about, but went with the one that has a 512 GB Hard Drive; not the “split” one. And it has a pretty hardcore video card. He’s not a gamer, but probably can’t hurt. He’s a budding ChemE major at a school that’s pretty engineering-focused. Just arrived and is pretty spiffy.
Thanks again.
@OneMoreKid good choice! Most likely you got the 2017-2018 model, and the main “flaw” of this laptop is the “nostril cam”, the camera is located at the bottom of the screen instead of the normal top of the screen. Any web cam software will have a good view of his nostrils. Other than that it’s a fantastic laptop.
Thanks. That criticism did come up in some of the reviews, but mostly a non-issue; hopefully.
It’s really a non-issue, but for me (I have the same exact model), I do use Zoom and Skype video a lot, and it does feel somewhat like a person underneath me shooting a video of me. I guess other people can’t tell whether I’m paying attention to them or not lol.
As a student, I don’t use the video camera on my computer very often, if ever, so I wouldn’t worry. For personal uses he can use his phone and for professional uses, his school probably has a laptop or webcam he can check out or go use.
The Dell XPS should be a great laptop; I almost got it myself. I get the appeal of the Apple brand, but IMO, if you’re getting an Apple laptop just so you can get Google Chrome and Microsoft Word on it, why get an Apple computer. But I digress.
We bought a webcam that I use when it’s pretty much required but otherwise, we just do texts and webinars. I’m perfectly fine with not projecting my image all over the web and actually prefer not to have my fact on folks’ screens unless there’s an important reason to do so.
I mainly use it for conducting interviews, often with students. It’s very common nowadays for interviews to use Skype or Zoom or Slack, etc. Often there will be white boarding as well so you can’t really use a phone. So that’s when it would come into play. Some people might not like having to “look up” at you to conduct an interview, but it’s not a big deal IMO.