<p>I live in a dorm that is about 45% course 6 (comp sci) and 22% course 18 (math). I am course 6 and I have a MacBook. Among my friends’ computers, I see a happy combination of MacBooks and Thinkpads, with a smaller minority population of Dells.</p>
<p>In case of computer emergencies, my dorm has several laptops you can borrow while you wait on your shiny new MacBook Pro. I don’t know if all dorms have this; if not, there are also a gazillion Athena clusters on campus and communal computers in dorms that you can use, though I prefer not to (keyboard==petri dish).</p>
<p>I can’t say that I’ve done anything my first year at MIT that required a particularly powerful computer, though it is nice to be able to handle Facebook, Gmail, an Excel file with my progress bars, my calendar, iTunes, several YouTube videos, all the 18.03 lecture notes from the past three weeks, zephyr, a book on Perl, and the p-set I have due tomorrow afternoon all open at once.</p>