My D’s college doesn’t require any particular laptop; they provide software licenses for a number of products.
My D has an almost 4 year old Mac Air we bought when she started HS and it’s working fine. We were planning to replace (we pay half / she pays half) but then given all the other mounting costs of college started wondering if we should wait until there’s something wrong with it?
She has auto cloud based back up service on the computer so if there were a hard drive failure she’d be okay. Most her docs and photos are in the cloud anyway.
She’s majoring in bio and will take intro bio and chem + labs this fall. No comp sci this year.
She will not have a car nor be near an Apple store. But I figure she could get a replacement in a couple days via Fed Ex if need be, and I’m guessing her college (small LAC) could give her a loaner for a few days in a pinch.
Should we bite the bullet and replace now or let it play out for another year or so?
(My fav. Mac laptop lasted 7 years (!) and then gave up. My current is also four years old and doing fine.)
I don’t think she’ll need a new one. As long as it’s working and has storage, she should be good, as long as her school is recommending something more.
It is very easy to buy a computer on-line. I’d send her with what she has and good backup software (which she has). Usually it is obvious when a computer just doesn’t cut it for a new situation, but I would wait.
My son, about to start engineering at a big ten school was told he needs nothing special beyond an ethernet cable. All the fancy software is on-line.
I would never push someone to spend extra money when they are also starting up paying tuition (!) but just make sure you aren’t being “penny wise, pound foolish”. How much storage space does she have left? Does the battery still hold charge for a long time? If the laptop was 2 years old I’d say you were golden but my kids 4 year old Macbook Pro started having problems this year and she was spending late night hours out of her apartment getting her work done on school computers because there was no $@#% Genius Bar to take it into. I feel like the Macs are programmed to self-destruct at a certain horizon, but I’m a PC and biased. Your D will make heavy use of her computer and the chances that this laptop’s going to last her the next 4 years are pretty slim so - when is a better time to replace it? Again, not at all saying she needs a new laptop! Just saying that replacing the computer if it is likely to need replacing soon anyway is easier done before she starts the semester.
My son just replaced his MacBook Pro after 4 years of undergrad, 2years of grad school, and 2 years as a professional writer. We discussed getting a new one when he started grad school but he thought it was safe to wait. He was right.
My son is a mechanical engineering graduate student. He was tired of lugging an workstation laptop, so he bought a new computer, a 2017 Air. They’re phasing it out, so it was a good deal. If there’s nothing wrong with it, no need to replace it.
It would be a nice gift/gesture but I’m a fan of the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Consider something else that could be just as thoughtful
Our kids independently both found having a very small and light netbook plus a desktop worked best for each of them. S was EE and D was cinema major. They had bought big, heavy laptops at beginning of college, which each broke and used the warranty money to buy netbooks and desktops with 2 monitors.
Yes, get it. During college and grad school we updated our kids’ mac laptops every other year. The “used” ones were passed along to cousins and grandmother.
Murphy’s Law says that if your daughter’s will break, it will be during reading period or when a whole lot of data is needing to be crunched for class.
