Which Laptop to buy

eyemgh
Tue, 03 Jul 2018 16:46:57 +0000

There are lots of threads on this in the engineering forum and the conclusions are as follows: 1) do what your department tells you to do 2) baring that, it doesn’t matter, any decent Mac or Widows machine will do. Some even use Chromebooks, but there are oddities in printing, etc.

The truth is that no regular laptop will have the power to do the heavy lifting of a desktop, very complex 3D CAD renderings quickly as an example. Plus you won’t get into that until late in your curriculum, if at all. You can buy such a machine (they’re called mobile workstations), but they’ll be almost twice your budget (or more) weigh more than 10 pounds and have terrible battery life. They are created for people who work remotely or who are always traveling where a desktop is not available. Most of that work will be done on a desktop, or by remoting in.

My son, who is now a ME masters candidate, had such a machine. It was Solidworks certified and was/is still a beast, but had all the shortfalls mentioned above. He’s tired of carrying it, but keeping it to use with monitors as a de facto desktop. He replaced it with a Mac, not the “best” one, since none of them are as powerful as his workstation, but with the best value, a 13" Air with a 128G SSD. Small external drives are dirt cheap these days. Going with 256G added $200.

Note that all the newest Macs have eliminated legacy plugs. They only have USB-c. It’s arguably better, but if you have any legacy plug equipment, you’ll need expensive Mac adapters or to get new stuff. The Air, technically a 2017 model, and on its way out, has legacy plugs.

Good luck!